


Nobody Knows What the Green Bits Are

by aromantic-eight (rbmifan), patrexes



Series: GBEU [2]
Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alien Cultural Differences, And Yes Loki's Canonically a Minor in MCU So Don't @ Me This is an Age Appropriate Relationship, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Infinity War, Developing Relationship, F/M, Intergalactic Road Trip, Moral Ambiguity, More Canon Compliant Than Canon, Non-Graphic Violence, Obliquely Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Trans Loki (Marvel), Trans Peter Parker, Very Unsafe Self-Surgery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-09
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-07-08 21:05:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 36,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15938267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rbmifan/pseuds/aromantic-eight, https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrexes/pseuds/patrexes
Summary: Instead of giving Thanos the Tesseract, Loki uses it to get a badly injured Thor to safety on Earth. Peter meets the person responsible for the Invasion of New York, who apparently hasn't aged a day since, and is alsothe coolest person he's ever met.AKA, the one where Peter and Loki stress Tony Stark out a lot. In space!





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> MCU doesn't know what it's own canon is, but in _Thor_ (2011) it's explicitly stated both that Thor and Loki are minors despite the horrid Dawson casting [[cite](https://patrex.es/post/173265478620), [cite](https://patrex.es/post/172263934925)], and that Asgardian magic is technological. We ran a marathon with it. 
> 
> Peter's trans because we want him to be, and the scene in _Spider-Man: Homecoming_ where he gets called a girl has _strong_ trans vibes. Loki's trans because it's [both myths and comics canon](https://patrex.es/post/176093941715) and honestly disrespectful at this point to say literally anything else. Read that link before commenting on it, please.
> 
> Please also note that this fic is from Peter's perspective, and that he has limited context for a lot of what's happening, has quite a lot of bias, and is... a teenager. He's not necessarily right in every assumption and his POV is not intended to be objective.

Peter tapped one leg nervously as Happy knocked carefully on a door Peter’d never been in before in the new headquarters. He glanced at himself in the window to the right as Happy poked his head in and straightened his spider suit. He didn’t know who else Mr. Stark had called, after all. He hadn’t contacted Peter much since Peter’s decision not to join the Avengers last year, and Peter knew that things with most of the other superheroes nowadays were… _complicated_. Then Happy turned to him and waved him in a bit tiredly. “Good luck, kid,” he said.  

Peter pushed open the door.

Inside was… not exactly what he’d expected. Not that he’d expected anything in _particular_ , exactly. But he was pretty sure that was Thor, with short-cropped hair and ugly burns and scarring across half his face, laying splayed out on a hospital bed with an IV in him and a gray haired man with weird red robes looking between Thor and the readouts of some kind of Star Trek looking scanner, deep concern on his face. Another middle-aged man was meditating on the floor near Mr. Stark, who was occasionally glancing over to a third mystery person who was slumped unmoving against the opposite wall, knees drawn up and eyes closed.

Mr. Stark noticed Peter and gave him a smile Peter didn’t think looked nearly as genuine as it was supposed to look, waving him over. “You’d better come over here, kid, I’ll fill you in.”

Peter looked back over at Thor, and then edged around the bed toward the group. He glanced at the slumped figure again and did a double take. It was a _kid_ , with long, messy hair and a weird leather-and-wool outfit like something out of the Elder Scrolls. An Asgardian. So maybe not a kid, actually, because Thor was, like, thousands of years old or something, and he didn’t look all that much older than Peter.

Mr. Stark started talking again while Peter was halfway there. “Okay, so. Here’s the scoop. About an hour ago, Dennis the Menace showed up with Tall, Blond, and Handsome, screaming bloody murder at anyone who would listen because Thor was kind of, um. Dead. As far as I could tell.” He waved vaguely at the bed. “He’s not, apparently. I don’t... think. Gandalf—” Peter figured that was the gray haired man “—hasn’t said much since he showed up, told us that ‘Thanos’ meant something really bad, and then told us to get the fuck away from his patient.” He paused. “Oh yeah. So, Thor’s brother,” he waved at the kid on the ground, “said someone called ‘Thanos’ did that to him, that ‘everyone was dead’, and that he was gonna ‘come kill us all’. Fun stuff. Maybe even true. I don’t know. _I’m_ not dead. We _are_ talking about the guy who tried to take over the world. God of lies, and all that jazz.”

Peter was standing in a room with _Thor_ and _Loki_. _Actual_ Asgardians. One of them was evil, sure, but still! He looked a lot younger without all the fancy gold armor and horns. Not that any of the footage had gotten a very good look at him. There’d been a call for phone videos just after the event because that was the best footage anyone actually had — all the news helicopters had been shot down by the aliens.

Suddenly Thor sat up in the bed with a yell, picked up ‘Gandalf’, and threw him against the wall. “ _Where is he?_ ” he bellowed to the room at large. “ _Where is Thanos?_ ”

Mr. Stark tensed a little, but that must have been pretty standard Thor behavior or something, because the other middle-aged man got up and checked on the guy but Mr. Stark didn’t even make to move; he just put an arm in front of Peter, as if he was barring him off, and said, “Listen, kid. You’re here to observe. Not to talk. Not a word.” He made a ‘zip’ motion. Peter nodded at him very seriously. He was going to see a conversation between _real superheroes_. From _space!_ And… whoever the other men were.

“Not here.” The tired voice came from Loki, who still hadn’t opened his eyes or moved from the floor. Peter had figured he was asleep, honestly. “We’re on Earth.”

“Earth—” Thor looked utterly stunned at the pronouncement, and then turned on Loki. “What have you _done_ , brother?”

Loki’s eyes were open now. “I saved your life. He was _killing_ you, Thor. I did what I had to do to save us both.”

“To save us both? And what of Banner? And Heimdall? Did you leave our _comrades_ and _friends_ with that monster to die?” That sounded bad. ‘Banner’ was the Hulk, Peter was pretty sure, and he’d disappeared from Earth around the same time Thor did, right? Peter had a feeling he was missing a lot of superheroing leading up to this.

“If I hadn’t, we’d _all_ be dead. And then who would warn the rest of the universe about what’s coming?” Loki spoke fast, like he was trying to squeeze as many words into a moment as he could. “Xandar and Asgard have already fallen. Earth will be next, you _know_ that.”

Peter pulled out his phone and shot off three texts in quick succession. _what’s Xandar? more aliens? it doesn’t sound very viking._ He thought for a second, and added _and who are the other guys?_

Thor faltered a bit at the mention of Earth falling next but quickly rallied. “We will speak of this later,” he told Loki, and then turned to Mr. Stark (and looked _almost in Peter’s direction_ ) and said, stiffly, “My thanks for tending to me while I was. Indisposed.”

Mr. Stark texted Peter back—an emoji face with a zipper for a mouth—as he responded. “Hey, no problem. But uh. What _is_ coming next? Did I hear right that the Hulk is dead?” He slipped his phone into his back pocket.

“If he’s lucky,” Loki muttered darkly.

“Yeah, I wasn’t asking for comments from the peanut gallery. Thor, what the hell is going on?”

Thor looked at Mr. Stark, and then glanced briefly at the people around him, and then at ‘Gandalf’, who was still lying on the ground where Thor had thrown him. The other dude didn’t seem too concerned, though, so Peter was pretty sure he was okay. Thor sighed. “Asgard is… gone. Destroyed. We were on a ship with the few we were able to save, when we were attacked by a being who calls himself Thanos. He was more powerful than anyone I have ever encountered. He seeks the Infinity Stones, and I do not want to think of what he will do when he has all of them. He has retrieved one already.” Thor’s mouth twisted and he added, “My brother may know more than I, about his old master. It was at Thanos’ bidding that he invaded Earth, and those memories will be fresher in his mind than mine.”

“He is no master of mine,” Loki hissed, “and, would you know, I’m _sick_ of this. I’m not your damn brother.”

Peter texted Tony, _the room feels SUPER empty. why isn’t mr rhodey here?_

“Okay,” Tony muttered, as he texted, _He’s off doing very important grownup things_ , “guess we’re doing the family drama first, then. Sure. Why not?”

Thor sighed again. “We are all the other has, Loki. Must you even now refuse our kinship?”

“You _know_ that's not what I mean.” There was a raw note in his voice now that Peter didn’t know the reason for. “As you knew the last time we had a conversation like this. And the time before _that_. You just have a convenient new way to misinterpret it now that my heritage is out.”

Thor paused, and glanced at the other people in the room. “Is this truly necessary, brother? We are in company.”

Loki sneered. “Anyone who might have cared about the shame I bring the family is _dead_."

Thor swung his legs to the the floor and leaned forward like he was going to stand up, which made Loki go weirdly tense. Thor said, “What do you want from me, Loki? You are a prince of Asgard, part of a noble and glorious legacy. You are my brother, and beloved despite all you have done. And yet you seem bound and determined to go down in history as some kind of invert.” He spat this last word the same way kids at school threw ‘dyke’ at Peter, and…  

…to be honest? Peter was getting a very particular vibe from this whole conversation. But he _had_ to be imagining it. Like, what were the chances, actually? He held up his phone again and texted, _hey, what’s an invert?_

_Old word for a gay person, I think? On Earth. On Asgard, who the fuck knows. Sorry, who the fudge._

_you’re allowed to say the f word, mr stark._

Loki cringed and stood up, sparing a quick glance towards the humans before staring at Thor defiantly, eyes shining. “Would that be so bad?” Loki crossed both arms. “You know, sometimes I wish I really _had_ been born a thrall. My namesake was apparently worth remembering beyond _her_ perversion, after all.”

“Oh my god,” Peter breathed. Then he remembered and texted, _OMG. loki’s trans? why hasn’t anybody ever TOLD me this?_ And then, _also, @thor: yikes?_

 _News to me,_ Mr. Stark responded. _I’ll ask the next alien warlord for pronouns._

_or warLADY. don’t be sexist, mr stark. girls can take over planets too!_

_Warlady’s not a word, kid._ He put his phone away before Peter finished typing _BC OF SEXISM_ and stepped forward. “Okay, cool, great talk, we've all learned a lot about, I don’t know, understanding each other’s life choices or whatever. Very touching. Can we deal with the supervillains now? Plural, because I notice there’s a baby supervillain standing literally—actually, I gotta ask. This has been bugging me since you showed up. How old _are_ you? Because you look _exactly_ the same as you did eight years ago, and it's really weird. Like, _Thor_ ages. Is that some kind of—” he grimaced, and Peter could hear the quotation marks clicking neatly into place around “—‘magic’ thing?”

“Time does not pass on Asgard as it does here,” said Thor. “While for us it may have been years, the Loki you see now is the same Loki who invaded back then.”

“Hardly,” she— _she!_ —said loudly. “It’s been _months_.”

Mr. Stark choked.

Loki continued, "I lost my mother, and then my _people_ , and I was stranded— _alone_ —on a hellish planet for _weeks_ , and I've lost track of how many times I’ve nearly gotten killed! I’m not a child anymore. I’ve grown up."

Mr. Stark held up a hand, “Okay, back up. What do you mean, months? Months since _what_? Your go at being a supreme dictator happened eight years ago.”

“For _you_ , perhaps.” Loki rolled her eyes. “Do you listen to a word that comes out of anyone’s mouth but your own? Thor _just said—_ ”

“But I thought Thor was, like, thousands of years old,” Peter blurted out. Every eye in the room turned on him and he cringed inwardly. But he’d already started, so, “You guys are gods or something, right? You’ve got to be _ancient_. Even if you _do_ age, it can’t possibly be noticeable to us!”

There was a beat of silence. Mr. Stark said, “He’s new.”

“I’m just _asking,_ ” Peter said quietly.

“Yes, how old _is_ the galactic traveller Thor now?”

Thor sighed. “You said it has been eight years on Earth since my brother invaded. For me, it has been six and a half. I am now 23 years old. For Loki, who has been in Asgard most of the time since, it has only been a few months. I doubt he is yet old enough to inherit."

Loki offered a tight-lipped smile. " _She_ turned seventeen a week and a half ago, which you would know if you'd paid _any_ attention at _all._ "

“Oh!” Peter cried. “Happy birthday!” Was it too late to get her something without it being weird? She’d just had her whole _planet_ genocided, and her brother was kind of terrible to her, like, oh my god, did he even _listen_ to himself? Even if she was sort of evil, Peter figured she could probably use _something_ nice.

Loki stared at him, for once not sneering. He wasn't actually sure what the expression on her face was. It could be 'who the hell even is this kid, he's awful.' Or it could be amazement that somebody was nice enough to wish her a happy birthday. Peter decided to go with the latter.

Mr. Stark had paused mid-thought, hand raised and mouth open, to stare at Peter too. He cleared his throat. “As precious as it always is to hear a seventeen year old swear she’s all grown up now, for real, if this guy Thanos was calling the shots last time, how do we know Cruella de Vil won’t stab us in the back?”

Thor sighed, sounding a lot more old and tired than 23—which, by the way, was still a _total_ let-down, even if weird time bubbles were cool as hell. “I wish I could tell you you need not worry about betrayal, but I cannot. However, Loki knows Thanos better than anyone else here, and we will need that knowledge. And I… do not wish to see him harmed. He is all I have left. If you know of a way to keep him… contained, but useful to us…”

Loki’s eyes had gotten progressively wider as she listened to Thor talk, and honestly Peter was pretty sure his were following suit. That was _gross_. Loki’s mouth opened, and then closed again, and then she sort of… deflated. Leaned back against the wall with this resigned expression like she wasn’t sure why she’d ever expected anything else.

It was kind of depressing to watch, but Mr. Stark didn’t seem to notice at all, or care. “Yeah,” he said, “I think I’ve got something to help with that.”

⁂

So the thing was, Loki was _really cool_. But apparently a supervillain, which meant Peter was pretty sure he shouldn’t be admiring her? She was a bad person, and they shouldn’t be friends, probably. This whole mission to save the Earth wasn’t going to end with her agreeing to give up her evil ways so they could hang out after school and see movies together and complain about cis people, and maybe eventually be _roomies_ or something—that would all be _awesome_ , but he was getting ahead of himself.

No, see, probably what would happen is they’d work together to stop Thanos, and Loki would maybe be _just_ on the verge of admitting it was nice to do good things sometimes, but she’d be driven back to villainy by the distrust of the heroes and the shittiness of her transphobic relatives. And then Peter would be forced to stop her, even after everything they’d been through together, and they’d spend the rest of their lives locked in archnemesis-hood.

Every superhero needed an archnemesis, right? Loki’s seemed to be Thor right now, but, honestly, Peter didn’t like that at all. She deserved an archnemesis who _respected_ her, and Thor definitely didn’t respect her. Peter wasn’t sure if ‘Loki’ was actually her name or if she didn’t have the energy to correct everyone deadnaming her, but even if it _was_ her name and Thor used it, he _super_ obnoxiously and pointedly misgendered her, and that was just… mean.

Anyway, Peter being Loki’s archnemesis _totally_ worked. Sure he hadn’t really gotten a chance to, like, _talk_ to her yet, but they were both trans! Their costumes had nice, complementary color schemes. They both had superhuman strength and agility augmented by cool gadgetry that gave them even more extraordinary abilities; like Peter’s web fluid and shooters were tech of his own design (with some suggestions from Mr. Stark) rather than something his body just _did_ on its own, Peter had found out through Mr. Stark that Loki controlled her illusions (holographic projections) and object summoning (quantum teleportation) with hyperadvanced quantum computer chips and haptic sensors that she had _embedded in her fingertips_ , which, if Peter was being honest, was _way_ cooler than magic. It was so… _cyberpunk_. They were perfect for each other, really.

He was in the middle of wondering what exactly he’d say the first time they met up face to face on the battlefield, when suddenly all the hairs on his arm stood up at once and he had an intense feeling of ‘danger.’ He looked around and out the window of the bus he and his class was travelling on to see a huge, giant spaceship… ring… thing. Oh.

Peter leaned forward, patting Ned. “Hey. I need you to cause a distraction,” he said, and then he climbed out the bus window and made a long series of super dangerous decisions that Aunt May would _totally_ have words with him about later.

If he ever made it back home.

Because he was kind of… rapidly heading towards outer space right now. Peter looked out the window at the retreating Earth and then steeled himself and went to find Mr. Stark.

He hadn’t caught everything that had happened after he found Mr. Stark at the park and they fought off the big guy going after Mr. Stark’s friend in the red cape, but Mr. Stark had gotten a call and then ship had started leaving, very, very fast, so obviously the thing to do was follow and help Mr. Stark.

He found Mr. Stark hiding in the rafters of a massive, super creepy room—although, to be honest, all of the rooms in this ship were pretty creepy. Peter wondered if they’d been designed that way. Evil villain ship, right? It stood to reason. Mr. Stark didn’t even yell at him (or… firmly whisper at him) for very long before he gestured him toward the scene below them. Peter peaked over to see… oh. That was Loki. Suspended on some high tech levitation table maybe? Surrounded by dozens and dozens of really thin, vicious looking knives. They were orbiting her, slowly, and Peter couldn’t get a great look from their position but he thought there were already small streaks of blood here and there where they’d made contact with skin. And there was an alien standing beside her, real close.

Tony whispered from beside him, “He wants the stone she’s got in her little magical pocket dimension. She told him _we_ had it. That’s about where we are now.”

The alien was stalking around behind Loki. His voice echoed in the room, so that they could hear it from their position even though the alien wasn’t really speaking that loudly. “I’m disappointed in you, Loki,” he was saying. “You were given an opportunity most people could only _dream_ of. To serve something greater than yourself. To usher in a _new age_.”

“So, kid,” Tony said from beside him, “any ideas?”

Peter looked around the room as the alien continued speaking.

“When Thanos found you, you were alone. Broken and senseless from the void between worlds, and abandoned by all those who claimed to care for you. Selflessly, he nursed you back to health. He brought you into his family, made you one of his children, because he saw potential in you.” The alien paused. “ _I_ saw potential in you.” He came back around to face Loki and now, as he spoke, his words were punctuated by slashes with the blades, each cutting deeper than the last. “He trained you. He tested you. He punished you _only_ when you failed to meet expectations, and fairly. What father does not wish to see his children improve?”

There was a laugh, pained and slightly hysterical. The alien held up a hand and the knives paused. “You find this amusing, child?”

Loki’s voice barely filtered up to them. Guess the room was only designed to amplify evil monologues. She said, “Never living up to expectations is my greatest talent.”

Peter winced as the alien backhanded her, hard, knocking her head into the path of several knives. Loki let out a sharp cry that was just as quickly bitten off. This was bad,  _really bad_. He looked around with renewed determination, thinking hard, and reminded himself that hurting someone to stop them hurting someone else was sometimes necessary. “So, uh. Have you ever seen that really old movie, _Alien_ or _Aliens_ or whatever it’s called?” Meanwhile, the real life alien got up scary close to Loki, grabbing one of her hands roughly and holding it out, palm up. He said something too low for Peter to hear.

Mr. Stark said, “Maybe. What are you getting at, kid?”

Peter outlined his idea quickly, keeping one eye on the scene below them as the alien methodically did _something_ to each of her fingers in turn. He had to remind himself to move as silently as possible, because he didn’t know what was happening now exactly but he doubted it was anything good. Mr. Stark dropped down just as the alien started in on Loki’s other hand. Peter edged around as Mr. Stark kept the alien’s attention on him. He waited for the very slight flash from the EMP cuffs around Loki’s wrists that meant Mr. Stark had deactivated them before quietly webbing himself into place against the wall and preparing to shoot more out at Loki once Mr. Stark made his move. He had to time this carefully, because too soon and the alien might realize what’s up; too late and Loki might be sucked out of the room with him.

Loki twitched in place as the cuffs deactivated. Peter wondered if she could sense it, somehow. The alien had let go of her hand when he turned toward Mr. Stark, and that hand curled. And then suddenly the alien stopped talking mid-sentence and made this weird, wet choking sound. Peter looked over to see a dagger sticking out of his throat, and that wasn’t the plan at all. Mr. Stark didn’t even _use_ daggers, and it was totally at the wrong angle for him to have thrown it. It was jammed _right_ in the base of his neck, straight on, like it had somehow just, like, _materialized_ there. What?

He didn’t put two and two together until he looked at Loki’s face, really _looked._ There was this tiny smile; genuinely _pleased_ in a way Peter’d never seen her before, and… anticipatory. That was— he wasn’t really sure what to do with that. Loki’s hand moved then, and so did the dagger. It pushed toward, through the alien’s neck, ripping open skin and muscle as it did, and there was… a lot of blood. Oh god. Peter turned away, and then he heard two dull ‘thump’s in quick succession.

“Kid, why don’t you check that the coast is still clear out there.” Mr. Stark sounded uncharacteristically uncertain, his voice moving as he spoke like he was headed toward where Loki had… been.

“Yeah. Yeah, sure,” Peter said. He un-webbed himself from the wall and started climbing, but couldn’t help but glance behind him one more time. Loki was kneeling next to the body of the alien, who’d been (oh _god_ ) practically decapitated, and she was prying open one of his hands with her own bloody fingers and taking something out. Peter looked at her fingertips, gashed open now, and realized what the alien had been doing to her. He’d cut out the microchips she used to do her tech magic. Oh. Then Loki retrieved her dagger from where it had fallen beside the alien’s head and started cutting into his chest, and Mr. Stark could handle whatever happened now. Peter kept climbing.

⁂

They didn’t go home, after that. Mr. Stark wanted to, to help with the invasion that might be taking place even now. Peter himself wanted to, but mostly because he wanted to go home and curl up in bed for maybe the next week. Which wasn’t a very hero thing to want, when the world was in danger.

But Loki argued that doing that would just be delivering the Space Stone into Thanos’ hand. That they could help more by finding the rest of the Stones that weren’t on Earth, and by finding allies who could fight Thanos alongside Earth. With the Space Stone, and with Loki’s magic unbound, they were free to travel wherever they wanted. It sounded reasonable, to Peter, but Loki was a supervillain, and he’d just watched her kill someone and _enjoy_ it. So maybe he was missing something.

When Loki had stalked out of the room toward the cockpit (“to find out where we are”), Peter thought Mr. Stark might follow after her, but he stayed standing beside the body of the alien (the _person_ ) Loki had killed. He lifted a foot and nudged the body slightly, then stared up into the walls and ceiling of the room. Peter wondered if he wasn’t sure what to do now either.

Peter went over to Mr. Stark, who glanced at him. “You doing okay, kid?”

Peter swallowed. “Uh. Yeah, sure. Kind of? Not really, actually.”

Mr. Stark turned around all the way to face him. He was a _superhero_ , Peter told himself. If anyone knew what to make of this, it’d be him.

“Loki just _murdered_ someone. And she, she looked _happy_ about it.”

Mr. Stark shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “We were going to kill the guy, too. Throwing somebody out of an airlock definitely kills them, and in a way that’s arguably grosser than… this.” He nudged the body again with his foot. Peter wished he’d stop doing that. “It’s just not as hands-on.”

Peter grimaced. “That’s totally not the same thing, though! We were doing it because we had to, to save people. To save _her!_ And we wouldn’t have _liked_ doing it.” 

“You’re really hung up on that part, aren’t you?” Mr. Stark said. He let out a deep sigh before starting in. “Listen, kid. I don’t like Loki, I don’t trust her, and I _really_ don’t want to have to play devil’s advocate for her. And I get why you’re creeped out. But I’ve kind of been in that situation before, and nobody swooped in and saved me. I had to save myself, just like she thought she had to, and… to be honest with you? It felt _good_ , to finally be able to fight back. To feel like I had some power again.

“So, don’t read too much into this, I guess. If she goes postal on somebody who _isn’t_ trying to destroy the universe and kill us all, _then_ we can worry.”

“Oh.” That was a lot, and Peter wasn’t sure how to feel about any of it. But Mr. Stark was probably right. “Because, um, the whole, going to other places and getting help with Thanos thing seems like a good idea. But I wasn’t sure, because maybe she’s trying to trick us, somehow.”

“She’s scared,” Mr. Stark told him. “She doesn’t want to go to Earth because Thanos is there. And that could be a problem, maybe.” He threw up one hand. “But honestly, I don’t know what we’d really be able to do there. Kid’s got a point.”

So they didn’t go home. Loki called them after a few minutes into the cockpit of the ship and explained what sector of space they were in, what planets they were near, how difficult it would be to get to various places, and said a bunch of other things that were definitely words, and meant nothing at all to Peter. A glance at Mr. Stark told him he was just as lost. So when Loki asked them—kind of awkwardly, like she wasn’t used to working _with_ people before, just taking orders or giving them, and was trying her best to be a good team player—what they wanted to do first, Peter shrugged.

“Space isn’t really my thing,” Mr. Stark said. He’d finally popped open the faceplate of his Iron Man suit so that they could see him. “You seemed to have this all figured out like twenty minutes ago. So, O Mystical Expert, where does someone go if they want to shoot all-powerful world destroyers? Can you buy death rays out here?”

“Oh,” said Loki. “I suppose… There’s another of the Infinity Stones on Knowhere, with a man known as the Collector. He—”

“—collects things?” Peter suggested.

“No, he’s an interior designer. Of course he collects things. He’s also a very _unsavory_ sort of character, which may prove useful to us.”

Mr. Stark muttered something quietly that might have been ‘you would think that.’

Loki gave him an unimpressed look. “Most people with powerful weapons of the sort we’ll be needing are very fond of _procedure_. We don’t have six months and fifteen character references to prove our good intentions, and we don’t have anything to give them in return to make _bypassing_ that procedure seem worthwhile. The Collector operates on the fringes of intergalactic law, so he has no one to turn to should we hold grievous bodily harm over his head in return for the powerful objects he hoards like a ged.”

“Okay,” said Mr. Stark, “but there’s no way in hell we’re the first people who’ve ever thought about threatening him for his stuff. You _just said_ he’s basically the black market.”

“I am well able to terrify whoever I wish,” Loki snapped. Peter looked at her, and she was pretty cut up, with blood smeared across her face, clotting in her loose hair, and _all over_ her hands, and her heavy black clothes were torn in a few places, but she was still standing apparently not too affected, like she totally had this all covered. Which. Peter remembered the last time he’d been badly injured, and he _could not relate_. So that was pretty impressive, he thought. And she looked totally punk, which was intimidating all on its own. _Peter_ sure wouldn’t want to mess with her, especially with the tired-but-determined look in her honestly _intense_ blue eyes. She didn’t seem like someone you wanted to get on the wrong side of, and that wasn’t even counting the _super powerful artifact_ she had in her pocket dimension or anything else she could actually _do_ to somebody. Like decapitate them with her mind. So he didn’t really get why Mr. Stark scoffed at that, but Loki paused anyway. “He also owes me several favors.”

Mr. Stark shrugged. “Oh, well, if he _owes_ you a _favor_ , he’s definitely the guy to go with. Won’t blow back in our faces at all.” He flipped his visor down and primed his Iron Man guns. “After you.”

Loki sighed and transferred her handful of fiddly electronics to her more-injured hand, extending the other, palm up, like she was holding up a serving tray. Peter hesitated a second, and then very casually stepped closer to her and leaned in a bit. “ _I_ think you’re intimidating,” he told her.

Loki raised an eyebrow at him and said, “Obvious flattery will get you nowhere.” But she was smiling, ever so slightly, so Peter counted that as a win. She twisted her raised hand in a movement that brought her arm down closer to her waist, and when she was done there was a glowing blue cube about four inches across in her hand.

“So that’s the Space Stone?” Peter asked.

“The Tesseract,” Mr. Stark said, an odd expression on his face as he looked at it. “Guess you must be an old hand with that by now.”

 _“A_ Tesseract,” Loki corrected, not looking away from the object in her hand. “It contains the Space Stone and makes it easier to interface with the Stone using our own technologies. They’re a very common method of containing powerful objects.” And then suddenly the whole room was glowing, bright white lights dancing on the walls, and then the walls weren’t _there_ anymore and Peter felt like his stomach had dropped out and they were somewhere else entirely, somewhere _lightyears away_.

“Woah,” he said.

She’d taken them to some sort of space station. It looked like a space station, anyway, because it was all metal, and it was _huge_ . Like, he couldn’t see the ceiling, just walls that suggested a ceiling. The room was filled with huge glass cases, broken and charred, with various weird-looking objects on their shelves. It looked like it had survived a really bad fire. Or maybe… _not_ survived, so much. It didn’t look like there was anybody home, but there were plenty of footprints in the ash on the floor, so clearly _somebody_ had been around, and recently.

“Oh, no,” Loki breathed.

“There was an Infinity Stone here?” asked Mr. Stark.

She nodded. “The Reality Stone. I sent Sif and Volstagg here with it myself, for safekeeping. Thanos must have discovered its location.”

“Maybe,” said Mr. Stark. “There might be a chance, still.” He didn’t sound like he believed himself at all, but he started walking through the ruins of the Collection, a laser grid coming out from the palm of his Iron Man suit.

So that was two Infinity Stones Thanos had collected. Probably. But there were a _bunch_ of people fighting him, and Peter knew that there were two more stones back on Earth aside from Loki’s, so that was at least _three_ stones with the good guys. Which meant they had the advantage, right? “So, who are Sif and Volstagg?” he asked. He wasn’t exactly a Norse mythology expert—not that any of that stuff apparently even applied to the two Asgardians Peter had met, anyway—but he didn’t recognize those names, so maybe that meant there was a chance they weren’t from Asgard, and were still alive to help take down Thanos.

“Friends of Thor’s,” Loki said. Crap. “Volstagg died with Asgard; as for Sif, I haven’t seen her since before this whole mess began. Most likely she’s dead as well.”

“Oh,” Peter said. “That sucks. I’m really sorry.”

Loki gave him a weird look. “Don’t be,” she said bluntly. “ _Thor_ will miss them terribly, I imagine. I won’t.”

“Oh,” Peter said again. “Why not?”

“Because I’m _evil._ ” Loki rolled her eyes and started to move away. Peter glanced around at the ruined surroundings and the still-smoldering shelves right next to him, and then hurried after her.

“I don’t think you’re evil,” he told her. “I think probably a lot of people have decided you are, because maybe they’re uncomfortable, and because you’ve had to do some bad things to stay safe—” Peter knew he didn’t have all of the information, but that’s what it _sounded_ like, from the monologue that alien guy gave when he was torturing her, and there were laws about punishing people for doing things they were forced to do, they learned about that in his Government class. It was, like. Coercion. “—but Thor said you tried really hard to save Asgard, and you saved _him_ , _and_ you’re helping us save the Earth now, even though it doesn’t really seem like you have any reason to. That doesn’t sound very evil.”

Loki stared at him silently before she pointedly turned away again, peering at the mangled shelves like she was trying to find something in particular. “Learn to recognize sarcasm,” she said shortly. “People use it when they don’t want to talk to you.”

Except Peter was pretty sure he was on to something here, now that he was trying to think about how _she_ was thinking. He kept following her as she moved on to the next shelf. “You don’t want to talk to me because I’m right, aren’t I? I bet Thor’s friends used to bully you, and that’s why you won’t miss them. I bet you’d miss Thor, too. That’s why you saved him and brought him to people who could help, when you could have left on your own and gone _anywhere_ —”

“You know, I killed Thor once,” Loki said conversationally, interrupting him. “I waited until he was mortal and vulnerable, and I sent a weapon of destruction to Earth to get rid of him.” She selected a heavily jeweled object from one of the shelves. “He came back, unfortunately.”

“That _can’t_ be the whole story,” Peter insisted. “Or if it is, you changed your mind later, ‘cos if you really wanted him dead, you’ve had, like, a _million_ chances. And Mr. Stark said you were _totally_ freaking out when you thought he was dead.”

Loki smiled sharply. “As Thor pointed out, I’m unpredictable and untrustworthy.” She sat down cross-legged in the ashes and lined up seven bloody microchips on her thigh.

Peter wanted to scream, a little bit. “I don’t _care_ about what Tho—oh my god, you’re just… doing that, right here.” Loki had carefully wedged one of the microchips between one of her fingernails and her blood-stained skin, and was now using the jeweled rock thing to _hammer it in._ Peter thought he might throw up.

Without looking up from her work, Loki said tersely, “I lack a better way to reinstall these at the moment. If you want to make yourself useful, go find something I can use for bandages when I’ve finished.”

Peter put a hand to his mouth and looked _anywhere but at Loki_. Mr. Stark was picking his way toward them through the rubble, so Peter went over there to see what he’d found.

“You’re getting awfully cozy with her,” Mr. Stark said, glancing over at Loki. And then, in fascinated horror, “Oh, that’s just _nasty_.” He kept looking. “Clever, though. I wonder if they need to be under the skin to work. Maybe an integrated biological energy source…” He trailed off, and Peter had the curious experience of being the only reasonable person in a room. It wasn’t a situation he found himself in very often.

“So!” he said, maybe too loudly. “Did you find the Reality Stone?”

Mr. Stark shook his head. “No go. Sauron must have left with it. Left basically everything else, though. I grabbed some of the smaller stuff that looked valuable but not, like… truckload of money valuable. We probably don’t want to be that kind of conspicuous.”

Because after this they were going to recruit help. On _alien worlds_. Not that this _wasn’t_ an alien world, kind of, but populated alien worlds! “We can use my backpack,” he told Mr. Stark. He’d put together a little fastener that hooked into the back of his suit to keep the small bag in place while he was web swinging, which was good thinking for this because he was pretty sure he’d have lost it during the fight in the park otherwise.

He unhooked it and opened it up so Mr. Stark could drop the little knickknacks he was balancing in his arms into it. As he did so, he spotted a flash of white and red and remembered. He had a first aid kit! Added to his crime fighting backpack after the time he went after two purse snatchers and misjudged a jump over a really badly maintained wire fence. He’d torn up his leg, and also left a very strongly worded note to the owner of the fence that it was a _hazard_.  

The kit didn’t have all that much in it that was going to be useful now; Peter had a feeling band-aids wouldn’t exactly cut it, not with as deep as her wounds were. Not even the knee and elbow ones. But he _did_ have about ten prepackaged alcohol wipes (disinfecting wounds in a timely manner was important!), and _those_ would be super helpful. Who knew _what_ had made its way into the cuts in Loki’s hands, and getting an infection when you were trying to save the universe would totally suck. Yes. He focused on that, and not on the memory of watching the bloody chip go _into_ her finger.

“Christ,” Mr. Stark said suddenly. “What’s she doing now?” Peter looked over too, and she’d hiked up her long woolen tunic (or maybe it was a short dress?) to her ribcage, and she had a small knife in one bloody hand and a small, rectangular piece of tech with sharp barbs on the upper face of it in the other, both pinched kind of awkwardly in her fingers, below where they’d been cut open. Peter had a really bad feeling about— _yep_ , there it was. She stabbed herself perfunctorily with the little knife, just under her ribs, and started to bring the little rectangle up to the new gash. “I hope she knows what that is,” Mr. Stark said, in a sort of resigned tone.

“I think it came out of the guy who took her,” Peter realized. “She can’t just _do_ that. That’s not safe, we should do something.”

“She’s Asgardian. They’re invulnerable or something. Anyway, _you_ wanna tell her no?”

Maybe. Peter stayed where he was, though, and vibrated a little as he half watched what happened next. Loki shoved the little rectangular thing into the stab wound, along with three fingers, and did… something inside her abdominal cavity, and then she jabbed two fingers of her other hand into the cut, and pressed her thumbs so hard against the skin above her lowest rib, the nailbed that wasn’t black and red with blood went bright white. She blinked hard, grimacing, but then she just pulled her fingers out of her abdomen, pulled her tunic back down over her leggings, and wiped the backs of her hands off on it.

“Are you just going to stand there and stare?” she asked, sounding more curious than anything.

“Oh!” said Peter, brought back to the present, and he rushed forward. He set the first aid kit on the ground and opened it, sorting through what was inside. “So, I don’t actually have any sterile bandages, not _real_ ones anyway—although the band-aids might work for some of the scrapes on your face, I guess—but I have alcohol wipes, and, uh. My t-shirt is _pretty_ clean. It’s not ideal or anything, but it’ll work until we can get to a real doctor. We can cut it into strips.”

Loki shrugged and looked to the side in a way that struck Peter as studiously casual. “I suppose it’ll do.”

Mr. Stark shifted awkwardly from behind Peter. “Well, this place has already been pillaged, so I’m gonna go finish looting, I guess. We’re gonna need the cash later.”

“This’ll probably be easier if we sit down,” Peter said to Loki, and he was suddenly very aware of what he was about to _do_. He’d only ever really done first aid on his own injuries.

Loki held out her right hand silently, the one with three undamaged fingers. “Actually,” Peter said. “I should probably disinfect your ribs. That’d be a really bad place to get an infection, and I don’t even know what was on that thing you put in.”

“Asgardians don’t _get_ infections,” Loki said, maybe a little sullenly. But she pulled her maybe-a-tunic-maybe-a-dress up to reveal the nasty red, jagged line of the insertion, still open a little, and seeping blood that pooled at the waist of her pants, probably staining them forever. Peter winced a bit when he saw it and started to dab at it gingerly with one of his alcohol wipes. As he did, he was very aware of the fact that that was a lot of skin Loki had, that he was right next to, almost touching. Her skin was really pale, with a collection of shiny, white scars all along her ribs and stomach. Some of them must have been from knives or maybe even swords—Vikings in space, right?—but others looked like they might have been burns, bullet wounds, even _bites_. But even with all the scars, her skin looked really smooth, and she was so skinny he could see the curves of all of her ribs. A few of them must have been broken before, because they’d healed up kind of crooked and angular, and… he was staring way too much, wasn’t he? The swab bunched a bit as he pulled it over the cut, trying to be gentle, and his fingers brushed her skin. This was really, _really_ awkward. Was he the only one finding this really awkward? He glanced up at Loki’s face, but she was still looking away, totally expressionless. Probably wondering what was taking him so long. Okay, be cool, Peter. This was fine. He was just disinfecting a wound, on a really cool girl’s… rib area, while she pulled her dress (or tunic! Maybe a tunic!) up to give him access.

After what felt like about a _million years_ but couldn’t have been more than a minute or two, he was pretty sure he’d covered all of the relevant skin around the wound. He looked back at his first aid kit. There were a couple knee bandages in there, that were pretty big. Not nearly big enough for this, which was probably a ‘gauze’ situation, but they were better than nothing. He took them out and ripped open the package and put them on. This made Loki actually look at him.

“What are those?” she asked.

“Bandages,” he told her, super casually and knowledgeably. “These ones are supposed to go on knees, like when you scrape them falling down, but they should keep _some_ dirt out of that.”

Loki touched one experimentally, her expression skeptical. But she sat up and pulled her… top… back down, giving him her hand again.

The silence was really awkward. That was what had made the rib thing awkward, Peter decided. There needed to be some friendly conversation here. “You’re allowed to be angry at people, you know. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or anything.” He used a clean section of the same alcohol wipe to scrub at the blood around one of her fingers, and, holy cow, the alien guy cut _deep_. When he put a little pressure on the top of the pad of her finger, so he could get a better angle, he could see all the way down to the bone.

Loki gave him a hard, unhappy look. There was something in it, too, like she didn’t trust him. “Why are you _trying_ so hard?”

“Because I _get_ it,” Peter said. “I know what it’s like, when… when everybody hates you, and you don’t have any friends or anybody you can talk to who understands what you’re going through. So I guess I thought, maybe _I_ could be your friend?” He wrapped a strip of t-shirt around her finger and tied it off, moving on to the next one.

Loki sneered at him, and it looked like she was thinking about pulling her hand away from him, _screw_ the bandages. “You think you can _understand_ me? Like my life is _anything_ like yours?”

“Well,” Peter said, a little uncomfortably. It _did_ sound kind of ridiculous, now that he’d said it out loud and everything. “No, not totally. I’m not a Space Viking, or royalty, or anything. And my Aunt May was _super_ supportive when I came out, which—I get the feeling your family _really_ hasn't been. But I do know what it's like for nobody to respect who you are. Uh. My first day at school after I’d told my teachers my new name, it was… really hard. I got bullied a lot, and one of my friends’ parents said she wasn’t allowed to hang out with me anymore, and a lot of other people acted like I hadn’t even said anything at all. They just… kept calling me my deadname and using the wrong pronouns, and ignored me when I tried to correct them. Like Thor was doing to you, back on Earth.”

Loki was just _looking_ at him, now, like he was speaking a totally different language or had grown another head or something. “You’re saying—”

“—I’m transgender, yeah,” said Peter. “In the… other direction, I guess, from you, so I don’t know _exactly_ what that’s like—trans girls get a lot of different crap from people than trans guys do—but I can relate. And…” maybe this was going a little too far, too fast, he was probably rambling, maybe, but they were already on a space roadtrip trying to save the Universe together, and at least this way it was _out_ , and they could go from there, because he really wanted her to know, “...I’ve never had a trans friend before either, not in real life. So I’d really like it if we could be, maybe. If you want to be, too.”

She was still just staring at him, and she didn’t just seem _confused_ now. She looked kind of… _scared_ , almost.

“You don’t have to answer right away,” Peter said, because he was pretty sure if he pushed any harder she would just run away from him, and he didn’t want that to happen. Especially not now that he’d just practically _bared his soul_ for her. He’d never talked about that with anybody before, except for Aunt May and the therapist their insurance covered for him to visit once a month. “Just think about it, okay?”

He finished disinfecting and bandaging her fingers in the heavy silence.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mr. Stark came back to the table then, sitting down heavily across from them and pulling his own bowl of ‘the special’ towards him. “Hello children, who are my very own flesh-and-blood children, and who I definitely raised according to this paperwork we have now! What are we talking about?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter two, as outlined, was meant to also contain what is now chapter three. Oops. 
> 
> Hope you like worldbuilding! There's a lot of it in here, mostly to do with Asgardian cultural/religious beliefs in this setting, particularly regarding namesakes. Don't worry too much if you feel like you're missing things.

They stayed in Knowhere for a few hours after that. Loki said that using the Tesseract by hand was really exhausting, and that she'd need a little while before she could take them to their next stop. Well. She'd said it a little meaner than that, but that was the gist. She didn’t seem to want to talk to Peter, so he mostly kept himself occupied by looking for electronics that were slightly less melted than the other electronics and seeing what was inside them.

Somehow, he’d thought real superheroing would have less standing around waiting than his friendly neighborhood crime-fighting did.

When they did finally teleport again, their destination was a lot nicer, which was a relief. It’s not that he was expecting the trading hub of a planet Peter had somehow completely missed the name of to be totally burned out and dead, but it was… a concern. Loki hadn’t expected Knowhere to be, after all.

They materialized on the corner of a street that was both familiar and very, very alien. There were eight lanes of traffic, which seemed to denote both direction and type of vehicle. Fast flying speeders zipped by alongside high-tech wheeled car, truck, shuttle things. Probably cars, unless the space community had embraced carpooling and public transit way more than Earth had. Peter hoped so. Maybe they had garden buildings everywhere, too.

He looked around at the overwhelmingly gray landscape. The buildings all looked like they might have been one of those really high tech white shiny utopia suburbs, like, 200 years ago. Now they were more off-white, and dotted with color from graffiti and what looked like additions to the walls put on afterward. One of them looked like a huge section of the wall had just been carved out of it, and inside he could see a lot of displays and shelving.

And there were people! Tons and tons of people, everywhere, lining the wide sidewalks on both sides of the road, and walking along balcony walkways and bridges over the road. The bridge closest to them had a hole right through the center, like something had crashed into it and broken it into two sections, and it looked like someone had just set up a food stall and a couple tables right on the edge. Most of the people he saw looked human, though the most common skin color seemed to be shades of blue-green instead of the human range. Then there were weirder body types. Someone brushed past the three of them who seemed to have _tentacles_ coming out of their face.

“Holy shit,” Mr. Stark said, almost matter-of-factly. “We are _not_ in Kansas anymore.”

Loki smirked at them, smug. “Impressive, isn’t it? Not as well kept as Asgard, of course, but even with my limited experience, I must imagine it’s leagues beyond what you could find on Earth.” Her smile faltered a bit at that, and Peter thought that maybe she’d briefly forgotten Asgard wasn’t… around anymore.

“Uh, wow. Rude, honestly.” Mr. Stark opened his visor again but didn’t take off his suit. It kind of made him stand out, even on a street like this. He hefted Peter’s backpack in one metal hand. “Okay, first thing’s first, let’s get these babies to a pawn shop. I gotta tell you, I am _not_ comfortable with being halfway across the galaxy and totally broke.”

“A pawn shop,” Loki echoed, a little blankly.

“Yeah. You know? Bring in items. They give you money. Usually not enough of it. You _do_ have those in space, right?”

“Of course!” She sounded a little defensive now. “Why wouldn’t we? We’ll find a pawn shop.” She looked around, and didn’t move.

“Right,” said Mr. Stark, “so, this is the part where you take us to a pawn shop. This is the _entire reason_ you’re leading this little intergalactic road trip.”

Peter was still looking around. He could hear bits and pieces of conversation from the people passing them, and he understood them fine too: mostly really normal stuff like relationship stuff, or dinner plans, or complaints about coworkers. The signs were completely unreadable, though. Peter was very sure he had never seen any of those letters in his life.

Loki was irritably saying, “Give me a moment to orient myself, won’t you?” She was looking at the store signs, too, and Peter wondered if she could read them. Probably.

“…Oh my god, you have no idea what you’re looking for.” There was a note of dawning horror in Mr. Stark’s voice. “Have you even been _here_ before? On this planet?”

Loki hesitated. “It’s a very well known planet. I’ve seen it depicted in _multiple_ very highly regarded pieces of foreign entertainment. It’s definitely where we want to be.”

“Excuse me.” Peter turned to someone who’d been leaned against a wall nearby this whole time, paging through what looked like… a holographic newspaper, maybe? “Yeah, uh, hi. We’re kind of new here, and we’re looking for a pawn shop. Do you know where that is?”

The alien, chitinous and unreadable, looked up and stared at Peter for long enough he started wondering if he’d said something wrong. Then they grunted, “You sure sound it. Kan-Tall’s used goods is two blocks that way.” They pointed.

“Thanks _so_ much.” The alien didn’t even respond, turning back to their paper. Rude, Aunt May would say, but they _had_ helped. Helping wasn’t rude.

Peter turned back to the other two as Mr. Stark was saying, “You took us to a planet you saw in a _movie_ once? We’re trying to save the universe, kid! What the hell kind of plan is that?”

“Mr. Stark?” Peter said.

His voice was still sharp when he turned to Peter. “ _What_?”

“I got us directions.”

⁂

The guy behind the counter at the pawn shop definitely short-changed them—the look on his face shifted _way_ too gleeful when he realized that Mr. Stark had no idea what he had and Loki had no idea how much things were worth for him _not_ to have—but then again Peter figured he could have been questioning the fact they walked in with a backpack full of probably really odd things that Loki claimed came from her ‘father’s estate’. She explained vaguely that they were in a bit of a sticky situation—“I’m sure you heard about Xandar”—and he gave her a little bit of a _look_ but was also happy enough to give them a list of motels and places to get food, as well as directions to an urgent care (which he called a Traveller’s Hospital) that he recommended they go to specifically. Mr. Stark got two little chips that apparently could be installed onto a HUD to give a visual translation of anything you read, because the other option was apparently being injected with something. Loki called it ‘Allspeak’.

“Hey, so,” said Mr. Stark to the guy as they were getting ready to go, “weird question for you: if I was looking for somebody who could save the Universe, who would I talk to?”

“Fuck if I know,” the guy said incredulously. “Do I look like I got the Guardians of the Galaxy on speed dial?”

“…Do you know who _does_ have them on speed dial?”

The guy leaned back and gave him a thoughtful look. “Could try the Ravagers. They have a bar just out of town, on the NP8 highway.” He glanced at Loki and Peter and said, “It’s a pretty rough crowd. And they got a lot of, uh. Adult entertainment.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Mr. Stark said. “Thanks again.”

⁂

“He’s gonna come back, right?” Peter asked. “It’s been, like, _ages_.”

When they’d gotten to the urgent care, Mr. Stark had told the two of them to sit down while he talked to the person at the front desk, since it’d probably be a while. About ten minutes after that, he got taken down a hallway—throwing a wink and an OK hand sign at Peter as he went—and he hadn’t been back since. It’d been at _least_ half an hour sitting in silence, fidgeting, while Loki was just sitting totally still with her haphazardly bandaged hands in her lap and her back so straight it didn’t even touch the seat. She’d said she didn’t need to go to the doctor, like, at _least_ five times on the way, and Peter wondered if it was an ‘admitting weakness’ thing or a ‘doctors’ thing.

“Presumably,” she said disinterestedly, and they faded back into silence for another few long, awkward minutes as Peter shifted his weight and tried not to stare at anyone or anything for too long. His eyes kept coming back to her, and after a while she said, without looking at him, “What was that word you used earlier, to describe yourself?”

It was the first time she’d brought it up. “Trans?” Peter asked. Except, that wasn’t the word he’d used. “Transgender?” he corrected.

“Yes,” Loki said tightly, like she was biting off every word, “Transgender. There aren’t people like that in Asgard.”

“But, _you_ —”

She ignored him. “There are men, in Asgard, who have honor. Who are brave, and stalwart, and true. And there are those who were offered by the Norns that fate, and cast it aside, _disgraced_ and _defiled_ themselves, and took the role of a woman in every way but would never, _could_ never be considered a woman themselves. It would be an insult to real women, and to the Norns who wove the fates we disregarded.”

He wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to listen to anybody who thought she couldn’t really be a girl. He wanted to ask if she knew anything about trans men in Asgard, if they were allowed to exist. He wanted to ask who or what the Norns were. But she was kind of on a roll, which is to say she’d already gotten to the next sentence by the time Peter opened his mouth.

“It’s not illegal, to be an invert. It used to be, when Bor was king. My grandfather,” she explained, before Peter could ask. “Now, it’s just shameful. Thor likes not to speak of it, because he thinks too highly—” she stopped “—he _once_ thought too highly of me to acknowledge that I could be the _brother_ he so loved and at the same time a cowardly, lying wretch of a witch who wanted so deeply to be anything but a man.” She sneered, and was so viciously angry that for a second Peter could really imagine a version of her who watched and waited for a moment of vulnerability to strike out at Thor. “ _Ironic_ , truly, since it seems our father and the Norns themselves colluded to ensure this is what I would become. My namesake was an invert as well; just as Thor’s hammer came to his hand ultimately from his namesake, so my perversion comes from my own.”

Wait. “Wait,” Peter repeated out loud. To be totally honest, he was definitely missing some context, like whatever a Norn was, and whatever superstition or religious thing was going on with names, but— “Your _father_? Your dad named you after a trans woman? Or, or ‘invert’, or whatever? Why?”

Loki shrugged. “Who knows? My nurse thought it was a kindness to her, maybe. You see, my namesake was a favored thrall of my father’s. She was taken when Asgard conquered Nidavellir—one of the elven realms—and apparently my father was quite enamored of her in spite of her elven origins and her perversion.”

“Thrall?” Peter repeated. “Conquered? Oh god, you’re talking about slavery, aren’t you? Asgard has slavery?”

“ _Every_ world has slavery.” The ‘ _obviously_ ’ hung unsaid as she continued her story like Peter hadn’t even spoken. “She died. I don’t know the exact specifics, but my father claimed an entire breed of horse from the man responsible as compensation, and he felt _terribly_ guilty about the whole ordeal. Even reformed the law to better ensure thralls’ safety. So one can certainly imagine.” Peter vaguely remembered reading a story from Norse mythology that involved horses and someone called Loki, and it had… gone places. He was pretty sure he didn’t want to imagine. “My nurse told me once that if not for my namesake’s no doubt horrid upbringing, she might have been quite amazing—after all, even at her dying breath, she was loyal to Asgard. By naming me after her, my father, in a way, gave her the chance to have an Asgardian childhood.” She made a haphazard attempt at a smile. “As you can see, it didn’t work.” Her voice was bitter, and the smile fell. “I suppose I was never going to be good enough.”

She fell silent then. After a couple of seconds when it was clear she was done, Peter said quietly, “I think you’re pretty great.” Loki looked at him, surprised, and he went on. “To be honest, I don’t know if I’d like you nearly as much if it had worked.”

Loki turned to look towards the door Mr. Stark had gone through and didn’t reply, but the tension in her shoulders had eased and she looked almost… relaxed. Like she was maybe comfortable for the first time since Peter had met her, in the medical wing of Stark Headquarters.

⁂

“Hi, how are you, great to meet you. I’m a representative of Earth here and I was hoping to ask you some questions. I _love_ your hat, by the way, _very_ fetching.” The hat in question was metallic and wide brimmed, and the top right section floated about half an inch off of the rest. The lady wearing it was looking at Mr. Stark with a mixture of irritation at being interrupted and ‘oh, it _talks_ ’ curiosity. She hadn’t immediately turned and left, though, which meant this was going pretty well.

Peter and Loki were camped out at a table nearby. Like the other tables at this food stall, it was positioned to have an excellent view of the sprawling, ornate, kind of weird looking building just down a flight of also very ornate steps. It was apparently some kind of city hall. On the table in front of them were stiff paper bowls full of ‘the special’. Neither of them had asked what ‘the special’ was, and Peter was kind of regretting it now.

“The little green crescents are _definitely_ gocjem pods,” Loki told him, holding one up— _with her mind_ , because the thing she’d shoved into her ribcage was a _telekinesis implant_ , and when the urgent care doctor tried to use a fancy beeping Star Trek-y tool that knitted skin back together on her fingertips, it just came up with an error message. Whatever Asgardian skin was made out of, apparently it didn’t read as _skin_. So that was fun, and meant she had to get a bunch of stitches, the old fashioned way. The bruise on her cheek had deepened to an angry purple, and the cuts on her face were still bleeding, just slightly. Loki had refused to get any kind of gauze for them, insisting that they'd be "fine by tomorrow", but they looked really painful to Peter.

For never having used telekinesis before, she was doing pretty good. The ‘gocjem pod’ wobbled a little bit, but that was all. “They’re in everything over here,” she said.

“I thought you’d never been here before.”

Loki made a face. “Thor loves them. He had them imported for four years straight once, because they were a popular alien staple and he just _had_ to have them.” Oh, god. Was Thor, like, the alien version of a weeb?

Peter looked at the little pods. “I guess they must be good.”

“They’re awful.” She dropped it back into her bowl and then very carefully hovered the odd two-pronged fork they’d been given with the food and used it to sift through the stir fry. “Do you suppose this is meat?” she asked once she’d speared one of the shapeless, off-brown lumps that made up a little over half of the mysterious mix.

Peter speared one on his fork and sniffed it. “Uh. Yeah, I think so. Smells like it used to have blood and stuff. _No_ clue what it is, though. Looks kinda… McDonalds’ chicken.” He realized Loki was trying very hard to look like she knew what that meant. “Uh, factory-made, I mean.”

Loki looked at her bowl in mild horror. “Appalling.”

“Not necessarily!” Peter said cheerfully. “We’ve got this food back on Earth, or back in New York really—I mean, people eat them everywhere, but they’re _totally_ a New York thing—called hot dogs, and they’re, like, the _best_ , but nobody knows what’s in ‘em. Meat _or_ anything else. There’s, like, feet and crushed up bone, and at _least_ three or four different animals all squished up together and wrapped in… intestine, I guess? And then it’s all covered in mustard and these weird green bits—”

“And people _eat_ that?” She began methodically picking out the probably-meat and eating it, not touching anything else. After a couple of attempts at doing this with the fork, she put it down and just floated the probably-meat out of the bowl and into her mouth. It was awesome.

“Okay,” he said, “First of all, that’s _so_ cool.” With the acknowledgement out of his system, he cleared his throat and added, a little more chill, “I guess you don’t have hot dogs over in Asgard, huh?”

“Everything an Asgardian eats comes from a farm within three bowshots of the dinner table, raised and slaughtered by honest workers the day before.” She sounded a bit like she was reciting from a textbook.

“Except gocjem pods.”

Loki laughed a little bit, almost begrudgingly. “Except gocjem pods,” she allowed.

Mr. Stark came back to the table then, sitting down heavily across from them and pulling his own bowl of ‘the special’ towards him. “Hello children, who are my very own flesh-and-blood children, and who I definitely raised according to this paperwork we have now! What are we talking about?” Peter watched as Loki’s grin immediately faded, replaced by a more neutral, guarded expression.

“Nothing that concerns you,” she said shortly.

“How much Loki hates vegetables,” Peter offered, and then changed the subject. “Any luck?”  
  
“ _Nope_. I didn’t even get her phone number.” He leaned toward Loki and stage whispered, “I feel ya, kid.”

He yawned, suddenly, which led to a mildly awkward moment where Peter and Loki both sat there, just… watching him yawn. He was still in his suit, just with the faceplate off. Peter wondered briefly if there was enough room in the faceplate for him _to_ yawn. What if there wasn’t, and he had to? That’d totally suck.

“Wow, I’m beat.” Mr. Stark glanced at his watch and gave a low whistle. “Kids, we have officially been up for twenty hours. I’d say it’s time to find a motel.”

“What? Already?” Peter gestured around them. “But we’ve hardly explored the city at all! And it’s barely afternoon here!”

“Uh, wow. See, the thing is, when you grow up and get older, you no longer have the bottomless energy supply you are apparently drawing from. As your father, I say it’s time for bed. You’ll thank me when you wake up.”

He jammed his fork into the bowl and shoved the whole forkful into his mouth without even _looking_ at what was on it.

⁂

The motel manager was a short, elderly woman who looked almost human if you ignored the way her skin _iridesced_ when the light caught it a certain way. Was that a word? He was going with it. She showed them to a room with two beds and really, really terrible green-and-purple polka dot curtains, and then left them alone.

Loki was eyeing the curtains with something like horror. “It’s like being back on Sakaar,” she said to herself.

“What’s Sakaar?” Peter asked, to no response.

Mr. Stark didn’t look much happier than Loki as he eyed the room. “Home sweet home,” he said, unenthusiastically. He deactivated his Iron Man suit and stepped out of it, and Peter watched avidly as it folded itself up into a briefcase. That was _never_ going to get old.

They stood around awkwardly for a few seconds, and it slowly dawned on Peter that they were here to sleep. And sleep meant sleep clothes. And Peter had ripped up his t-shirt to wrap Loki’s fingers with. He glanced over at Loki, who was frowning at one of the beds, and down at his spidey suit, which was really not as sweat-absorbent as you would think given how _ridiculously_ high tech it was. Sleeping in the suit would be gross. But taking it off meant sleeping only in boxers, in front of Loki.

This was bad.

Mr. Stark gave him an odd look as he walked over to the bathroom and only jabbed ineffectually at the wall twice before the door slid open to let him in. Peter tried to reason with himself. It wouldn’t be that bad. He could change and then, like, immediately get under the covers and that would be fine. Totally doable.

Peter turned around so his back was to Loki and shed his pants before tapping the spider emblem on his chest to let the suit out. He stepped out of the now-loose suit and beelined straight for the bed, getting under the covers.

“Well, it’s been a fun day,” he said to the room at large, too loudly.

“That bed smells like sex,” Loki informed him.

Peter brought the blanket in his hand up to his nose and sniffed it. It did smell weird. He wasn’t sure exactly what sex smelled like.

Loki continued, “And there are stains on the floor, Norns know what _of_. We’re not planning on _staying_ here, are we?”

“Uh.” Peter said. He was still looking at his blanket. _Did_ it smell like sex? He sniffed it again.

“Unfortunately, your Royal Highness, we are.” Peter jumped a bit at the sound of Mr. Stark’s voice behind him. He hadn’t noticed him come out.

Loki sniffed at the floor stain imperiously. She still didn’t make any attempt to move and Peter realized suddenly she probably didn’t have a change of clothes. Did Asgardians wear underwear? Did she have something to sleep in? “Do you have pajamas?” Peter asked, and then kicked himself. Obviously she didn’t.

“…Pajamas?”

“You know. Like, sleep clothes. To sleep in.”

“Oh.” Loki looked thoughtful for a second, and then she stilled.

“It’s okay if you don’t.” Peter told her. “We’ll figure something out. We’re good at that.”

She still didn’t move, staring at the ground with rapt attention. Mr. Stark pointed at her. “Is she okay?”

Peter told her, “We… might be able to find another motel? One that’s nicer, maybe? We have enough for that. We’re only going to be here a couple days.”

Then Loki suddenly _dissolved into thin air_. Peter’d just started groping around for his spidey mask and trying to remember where he’d _put_ that (was it in the backpack he’d given Mr. Stark?) when he realized there was now another Loki standing just a few inches to the left of the one who’d dissolved. This one was wearing some kind of pale green sleeveless dress that fell about five inches above her ankles. She was standing with her arms crossed in front of her and looking aggressively over Peter’s shoulder, and she said, “A word and I will gut you where you stand.”

 _Oh_ , Peter thought. She must have changed under an illusion.

“Woah,” said Mr. Stark. “What's with the hostility? We're all more or less on the same team here.”

Loki glared at him, and then seemed to realize there wasn’t really anything to glare about, and just looked sullenly at him instead, crossing her arms in front of her.

“Nice. Real classy. Anyway, early bird gets the worm, or whatever, so you can either share with one of us or sleep on the floor. Your pick.”

Loki glanced at the floor, and then at the two of them. Then she walked over to Peter’s bed and _got in beside him_ , oh god. Peter started to sink under the sheets as she somewhat stiffly arranged herself so she was wedged to one side of the bed and not touching him. Then he remembered these were sex sheets, apparently, and he came back up.

Be cool, Peter. This was no big deal. Just a little bit of bedsharing between friends.

“Be good, kids,” Mr. Stark said loudly as he got in his own bed, that he got all to himself. “No bad touching. I’m literally six feet away.”

Then Mr. Stark turned off the lamp by pressing at the nearly-imperceptible buttons on the nightstand until the light went off. At the same time, there was a faint whirring sound and some kind of shutter slid shut behind the curtains, blocking out the afternoon light. So the curtains weren’t even _for_ anything, apparently. Peter reached out and turned off his own lamp and they were left alone in the dark. To sleep.

Peter was very awake.

Beside him, Loki shifted slightly. Peter tried not to move. He was very aware of the fact that every slight shift on his part moved _the entire bed_ , basically, and was going to keep Loki up, probably. He wasn’t sure how, like, married couples did it.

Loki shifted again, and Peter looked over to see her lying on her side facing him.

“Are you awake?” she whispered.

Well, he was. It had only been a couple minutes, even though Mr. Stark was snoring loudly beside them. “Yeah,” he said.

She didn’t talk again for long enough Peter wondered if maybe that was a one off comment, or she’d fallen asleep. Then, suddenly, “Why don’t you have breasts?”

Peter wondered if _he_ could pretend he’d fallen asleep. This was very not the conversation he wanted to be having right now. Or ever. He turned so he was lying on his back and not looking at her. “‘Cause I don’t. Never did.”

He could _hear_ her frown. “I thought you said you were… like me.” Her voice was tenser than it had been just a few minutes before. Wary, almost.

Of course Asgard wouldn’t have anything like puberty blockers, if things were as bad there as she’d said. He tried to keep the irritation out of his voice—it wasn’t _her_ fault she didn’t know, and if he were in her position he’d bet he’d feel super vulnerable right now—and said, “On Earth, we’ve got these pills. Well, sometimes they’re injections. And there are a couple different kinds, like—uh. It’s not super important. But! If you come out before you hit puberty, and your parents are supportive, you can actually stop it, and get it switched to the right puberty, which is what I did! So I never developed breasts. They can do that with—do you know what hormones are?”

Loki thought for a couple seconds. “Is adrenaline one?” She didn’t sound like she was dreading the answer this time.

“Yeah,” Peter said, “it is. Not the kind of hormones we’re really talking about here but, yeah, that’s great! A lot of people don’t know that.” He guessed Space Vikings probably had other things to learn about. Like swords and stuff. “Uh, anyway—you probably don’t want a whole lecture, but—basically, there are a couple hormones that control sex characteristics, so if you block the hormones your body makes naturally and take other ones instead, you can change how your body looks, and how it works.”

“Oh,” said Loki. “Like whether someone can get with child, or get a child on someone else?”

It took a second to parse. “No, not with hormones. That’s more, breasts and body hair and maybe how your voice sounds. But there are surgeries you can get to change stuff… more invasively. And new ones are getting developed all the time!”

She made a thoughtful noise. “I’ve heard about such things being done on alien worlds,” she said. “Never in Asgard, of course—” Right. Insult to the Norns. “—but it wasn’t unheard of, among the alien thralls, and freaks always make _fantastic_ aletalk,” she added, with the bitterness of personal experience. “I’m told the children of those thralls never come out right. No souls, even once named.”

“Yikes,” Peter said, a little louder than he intended. Mr. Stark turned over in bed. “That’s probably not true,” he said in a whisper. “I wouldn’t worry about it.” Peter wasn’t sure he believed in souls at _all_ , to be honest, but he also wasn’t sure if she was, like, actually really religious herself, or if Asgardian religion had just had a big effect on her life, and he didn’t want to make her feel weird about it either way. “Do you want one someday? A baby, I mean. Not a soul.”

It was hard to tell, a lot of the time, what Loki really wanted or was getting at when she talked: she might just be interested in what medical transition was capable of, or that might be her way of saying ‘could I ever have my own kids?’ without seeming too vulnerable or something.

But Loki tensed up when he asked, and immediately said “ _No_ ,” in a choked-up voice. “No, absolutely not.”

“That’s okay!” Peter reassured. “I’ve never wanted them either.” Then he realized what he’d just said. While laying next to her in the same bed, shirtless and in his boxer shorts, and he wanted to crawl _straight out of his skin_. That was totally not what he meant.

Not that he’d be _against_ a conversation like that, theoretically, in the future! The far future. Because that was a really grown-up thing to talk about, and he wasn’t even a senior in high school yet! But they’d probably have to adopt, anyway, even if there _were_ all the right surgeries for it, and wow the thought that somewhere that was possible _right now_ was. Amazing. But, god, they were _not_ having that conversation. Especially at… whatever time it was now. “Adults really like telling you you don’t know what you want with your own body. _Especially_ when it’s about babies. But, uh. You knew that already, probably. So. I’m gonna shut up now.”

Loki’s hummed acknowledgement seemed like she wasn’t really paying attention to him, and she pulled up the sex blanket up all the way to her neck, turning onto her side away from him. She was still weirdly tense.

“Sorry if I made you uncomfortable,” said Peter.

“You’re fine,” said Loki tonelessly.

“Oh. Okay.” He looked at her back worriedly. She didn’t say anything else that night, and he eventually drifted into somewhat restless sleep.

⁂

“Okay, so. We have about 64,000 of… whatever the fuck this is,” Mr. Stark stacked the last embossed triangular bill on the top of their stack. “Which I’m gonna take a stab at and say is, what, three thousand bucks, maybe? Give or take a few Ben Franklins.”

“I didn’t know you were familiar with alien currency,” Peter commented, poking at a matching game on his phone as he sat across from him at the sleek, yet somehow still rickety little card table their room came equipped with.

“It’s a rough estimation from decades of experience with nearly incomprehensibly huge piles of cash,” Mr. Stark said. “Billionaire, remember? I know my stuff.” Peter reached across the table towards one of the stacks and Mr. Stark batted his hand away. “Oh, no. You don’t get an allowance. Last thing I need is you wandering off.”

“Oh,” Peter said. “So where are we going?”

“ _We_ are going nowhere. _I_ am going to that bar we kept hearing about yesterday. Today. Whatever. No kids allowed.”

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll murder your protégé while you’re gone?” Loki drawled from where she was sprawled on their bed, very busy with looking bored. She still hadn’t gotten cleaned up yet, but a lot of the blood on her face had flaked off overnight, and the scabs looked halfway healed over; the bruise on her cheekbone already purple-green. Asgardians. _Wild_.

“…I _wasn’t_ , until _just now_.”

"Loki's not gonna hurt me," Peter said, not even looking up from his phone.

Mr. Stark peered at him until he looked up and made eye contact. “Listen, kid, I know we’re currently on the same side and everything, but… be careful how fast you assume someone’s never gonna hurt you.”

“You needn’t worry,” Loki sat up in one fluid motion and set her feet on the floor. “I’ll be accompanying you to the bar.” She sent a sharp grin his way. “Doubtless you’ll require protection.”

“Uh. No. Sorry, maybe I wasn’t clear enough earlier. _None_ of the children in this room are going to the raunchy mercenary bar.”

“I’m _sixteen—_ ” Peter started.

At the same time Loki scoffed, “It's nothing I haven't seen before.”

Mr. Stark looked at her dubiously. “Yeah, sure. I believe that.” His eyes flicked towards the tiled ceiling. “Listen, okay, I have to answer to this kid’s aunt.” He pointed at Peter. “If she finds out I took him to a titty bar, she’ll kill me. So I need _you_ to stay here and make sure he doesn’t try and tag along.”

Loki stared at Mr. Stark for a long moment, and then looked over at Peter. “Fine. Since you asked _nicely_ ,” she sneered.

“I still haven’t agreed to any—”

Mr. Stark interrupted him cheerfully. “Good! Okay! I’ll see you kids later, then!”

⁂

Mr. Stark got in touch with—read: bribed—the motel manager before he left, too, asking her to keep an eye on ‘his kids’. Like Peter was going to follow him as soon as he was out of sight. Which he _wasn’t_. He wasn’t going to go anywhere near that bar. Because Peter was going to use tonight to go _birthday_ shopping.

He’d thought about it a lot that morning. He’d woken up before the others, sweaty and still not super comfortable sleeping beside someone _—_ even though Loki was wedged up against the edge of the bed and curled in on herself, not at all in his space. He couldn’t get back to sleep so instead he thought. Loki’d said way back when this whole thing had started that she’d turned seventeen recently, and Thor hadn’t even noticed. He wondered if anyone had noticed, or if it had just gotten buried in whatever happened with Asgard. Losing your whole planet on your birthday would be, like, the _polar opposite_ of a present, and even with all that important stuff going on, it must have still hurt to feel like nobody who cared about you bothered.

He _also_ remembered what she’d said about her family, and he remembered the lip gloss and jewelry and pretty clothes he’d gotten every year for his birthday before he came out—and still did, from the sorts of distant relatives who sent Christmas cards with two-paragraph years in review—and he wondered what kind of presents she’d have gotten for her birthdays before this. If she’d liked them at all.

And sure, he couldn’t fix a whole lifetime of her family thinking she was flipping off the gods or something for daring to not be a straight guy, and he couldn’t fix her whole species being dead, but maybe he could do _something_ to at least show her that someone cared about her, and what _she_ wanted, for once. Maybe it would change something.

Or maybe he was too hopeful, and a birthday present from some random kid she’d _just met_ wouldn’t suddenly make her feel wanted and accepted. She still deserved _something_ , and anyway, they’d seen a bunch of really cool looking stores when they ‘cased the city’ earlier and Mr. Stark hadn’t let them go inside _any_ of them. Something about how they weren’t going to save the Universe with a shopping spree.

So. Peter had a plan. The motel manager wandered off to deal with some motel-ish issue shortly after Mr. Stark left, and then Loki went into the bathroom to take a shower. Or, he was pretty sure, anyway. It didn’t exactly sound like running water in there, more like a kettle whining, but Mr. Stark’s shower had sounded like that too, so he was pretty confident.

The motel manager might have promised to check up on them, but she couldn’t stop them from leaving because their room had its own outside door. Peter 1, Mr. Stark 0. He put on his spidey mask, grabbed the hefty stack of alien currency Mr. Stark had left behind with a comment that going to a bar like that with so much cash was just asking for trouble, and slipped quietly out the door.

“Hey,” he said as he jogged across the parking lot, the interlocking solar panel tiles a super weird sensation under his feet. They had a grip to them like those sticky socks they give you in the hospital. “Karen. You there?”

The familiar electronic voice buzzed to life in his mask as he wove through the eclectic collection of car-like objects parked tetris-style, wherever there was space. Most of them seemed to be hovercars, so it made sense they didn’t need to necessarily be able to _get out_ any way but vertically. “I’m always here, Peter. What’s up?”

“I’m on a mission,” he told her. “In an _alien city._ ”

“Exciting,” Karen said. “What’s the mission?”

“Well.” Peter hesitated. “There’s this girl,” he said. “She just had her birthday and I haven’t known her for very long but I kind of want to get her something anyway? But not just _something_ , you know? Something really special.”

“It sounds like you must care about her a lot,” Karen said, and Peter figured that, compared to most other people, that was probably true. “What are you planning to get her?”

“Uh. I’m… not sure yet.” It occurred to him he actually knew very little about what Loki _liked_. Besides, like, magic computers. And stabbing her torturers. And not being called a boy. “But I’m sure I’ll know a good one when I see it! I just have to look around! Yeah.”

He was at the street now. It looked different now that the sun had almost set, the curved grey buildings now cast in shadow and soft glowing lights lining the sidewalks. There were just as many cars around, though. Peter’s fingers itched to swing himself up onto the walls and roof where he could get a better view, but he didn’t want his shopping trip to be cut short by, like. Giant police robots, or whatever this planet used to patrol the roofs.

Save the swinging for after he got the present. It’d make for a faster trip back. And anyway, he only had so much web fluid in his backpack. If he ran out, he’d be _screwed_.

“Hey, Karen,” he said, and then stopped. He’d seen a shadow move. Over there. He stopped walking and looked around, but Karen had even pulled up the infrared heat-cam on his heads-up display and there was nothing there. Not even a blur of warm air to suggest something might have been there.

He waited, wrist poised to shoot a web if necessary, and he listened for movement. He could _swear_ someone was there, and his spidey senses might have been a little anxiety-prone, but they agreed he wasn’t alone, too. He shifted his weight into the balls of his feet—the last thing he needed in a fight was to lose his dex bonus—as the air _shifted_ and suddenly there was someone standing _two feet in front of him_ , outlined in shifting teal and yellow-green. Peter turned off his infrared. The shifting colors resolved into Loki (weren’t people supposed to be red?), because _of course_ it was. He should have known she’d follow him as soon as she realized he was gone.

Her hair was still wet from her shower, dripping black onto the dark green shoulder straps of another dress she’d pulled on over the one she’d slept in. It also had a high, simple neckline and no sleeves, and fit quite snugly over her ribcage, with long slits at her sides starting high on her waist that revealed the paler green (and much thinner and less sturdy) fabric of the dress beneath it. She’d forgotten her shoes, too, but there was something about her, some kind of power in the air that made her seem a lot more dangerous than she ever had in the daylight, even in her armor. She looked otherworldly, almost fae, as she tilted her head up and stared imperiously at him, and for the first time, Peter understood why she was called a god.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Loki!” Peter yelped. “Hi! Wow, you look… really pretty.” He couldn’t stop looking at her and, _oh_ , that was probably a bad sign, wasn’t it?

Loki’s eyes widened, caught off guard for half a second. She looked nearly vulnerable. “That’s,” she started, and stopped. “I asked you a question,” she finished, dour.

“I’m just, you know. Around. For a walk. It’s a nice night.” Peter glanced behind her at the road and wondered what his chances were if he just made a run for it. “You could come with me.”

Loki stared at him. “For a walk,” she said dubiously.

“Yeah!”

“You took the money—” wow, he could _hear_ the this-is-a-foreign-word italics on that “—Stark left, for safe-keeping, on a walk?”

Busted. “I mean, uh, you never know when you might need some cash when you’re out and about! You might get hungry, or need to grab a drink, or come across a store with a super important Universe-saving MacGuffin in it! You never know!”

“Mmm,” Loki said, very clearly not believing him. “I suppose you’re set on this ‘walk’ of yours?”

“Yeah,” said Peter, “a bit.”

“It would be difficult to explain to Stark how I managed to let you run off and get yourself killed,” she afforded.

“I guess you _did_ threaten to kill me literally right before he left. Would look pretty bad.”

Half her mouth turned up in a lopsided smile she _totally_ thought he didn’t notice. But he did. He did. “You make a decent point,” she said, and fell into step beside him, her dress swishing a little as they walked. Peter led them to where he remembered there were blocks and blocks of nothing but stores, like a whole market district, or maybe a really big outdoor mall. He’d heard they had those in California, and California seemed a little bit like outer space. After a little while, Loki started throwing him these weird looks, just a half-second at a time.

“What?”

“You’re _really_ just going for a walk,” she said, like he’d told her he could disprove the theory of general relativity and then he _did_. “You don’t want to follow Stark to that bar of his?”

“ _Well_ ,” Peter said, “technically, we’re kind of going window-shopping. But yeah. We couldn’t get into a bar anyway,” he added. “Even if the drinking age here is, like, super low, we don’t have I.D.” Except for the temporary paper ones that Mr. Stark had gotten, that said they were his kids, anyway. And _those_ , Mr. Stark still had. When they’d gone to the urgent care and the receptionist had wanted Loki’s I.D. (or her legal guardian’s) before they could treat her, she didn’t even realize what they were _talking_ about at first; Peter figured that when you were the princess of a planet, nobody there really had to ask you who you were.

“Of course we do,” Loki said playfully, and twisted her wrist in on itself. When it had made half a rotation, there were two alien-looking I.D.s wedged between her middle and pointer fingers, with what looked like legit information, and holographic images of the two of them. She dropped the cards and they disappeared into a flare of green light before they hit the ground.

“Woah,” Peter said. “How’d you—?”

“The motel had a sign at the front desk with images of the accepted forms of identification from various planets. It isn’t difficult to pick out which they’re least likely to see often and thus notice any potential discrepancies in.”

Peter laughed. “You could totally make a business out of that. You’d make a killing at my high school.”

Loki quirked an eyebrow. “Is ‘high school’ where you learned to climb around the top of buildings?”

Peter coughed a laugh. “I wish,” he said. “It’s mostly where I try not to get called truant from when I’m superhero-ing.”

Loki grinned. “I made two of my tutors quit,” she told him proudly. “They claimed _emotional distress._ ” It didn’t sound like she thought it was a valid claim.

“Oh my god,” he said, as they were getting into the marketplace, which had the same kinds of windowed storefronts that there were on Earth, although the mannequins were a lot more varied. “What did you _do_ to them?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Not that _nothing_ is what they _felt_ they experienced.”

Peter stared at her, not sure how to respond to that. “That doesn’t sound like nothing to me.”

Loki smirked, a little nastily. “It was ‘only’ illusions. They were the ones who insisted that mere illusions couldn’t _possibly_ win a battle. I was merely demonstrating why they were wrong.” She shrugged dismissively. “You would think _proper warriors_ would be able to take more punishment before fleeing.”

That was a little—a lot—terrifying, and Peter had a feeling he should examine at some point why watching her smirk like that sent heat sweeping through his abdomen, but he also figured he probably should have seen it coming. Supervillain, and all. They drifted into companionable silence after that as they walked down the street, looking into the store windows.

Peter kept half an eye on Loki as they walked by, trying to see if anything seemed to interest her more than others. It occurred to him that there were a lot of stores here and they wouldn’t possibly have time to visit even a tenth of them. What if they didn’t come across anything that Loki would want as a birthday present? How would he even know if they did?

“Does Asgard celebrate birthdays?” he asked suddenly. That was a totally normal question, right? Not even everybody on Earth did birthday stuff, right, so, like, he was just doing some cultural exchange. No other reason. “Like. On Earth, where I’m from, people usually throw parties, where their friends come over and they eat cake together, and then the people who know them give them presents. Sometimes big things, sometimes little things. My best friend  Ned and I have always gotten each other LEGOs, although last year was the first time I had money to buy the set I got for him myself.”

“LEGO? Is that a melee weapon, or more of your human gadgets?”

“Uh. You build stuff with it. Like…” He searched around for a way to describe it that sounded _cool,_ and not like the kind of thing that made the girls at his high school call him a nerd and laugh at him. “Like you can make miniature versions of a lot of different buildings and cars and stuff. Pretty much whatever you want! Some people have made replicas of entire towns with LEGOs before.”

“Oh,” Loki said in understanding. “Like a tactical map. That sounds _very_ useful.”

“…Sure.” At least she was impressed? “Anyway, do they do anything like that in Asgard?”

Loki thought for a second. “One’s family gives gifts, especially on the more important dates. Weapons, though always blunted until you’re old enough to begin more rigorous training.” She held up a hand and wiggled her fingers. “The first of these, my mother gave me when I was eight. Not a weapon in and of itself, but a way to call them forth. I learned how to code my own custom features quickly enough.

“Then,” she continued, “there is armor, once you’re old enough to attend feasts, and at majority, whatever it is that’s the best your family can afford. Often the weapon of your namesake. Thor was gifted _his_ early, of course.”

Peter wasn’t sure why that was ‘of course’, but that all sounded very… formal. “What was your favorite gift?”

“My _favorite_?”

“Yeah, like. The one you liked the most. Or the one that meant the most, maybe. Either works.”

Loki made a face, like she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say. “I was given a set of throwing knives when I was twelve; I suppose I use them the most.” She hesitated. “This dress… my mother gave it to me the same day my brother received Mjolnir. It was in a box, along with everything my namesake owned before she died. It was the closest gift she could give to my namesake’s weapon, as thralls were never allowed them. This is the first time I’ve worn it outside my rooms.”

“It’s a really nice dress.”

Loki laughed. “It’s a slave’s dress, cut so she could never hide something in her skirts. Or hide _in_ her skirts.” She snickered at some kind of private joke Peter had clearly missed, but then she kept talking, her voice half contemplative, half amused. “What do you think it says about me, that I feel like I was meant to wear it? I was meant to be a prince, and yet the garb I find most comfortable is that of a slave. Truly,” she said conspiratorially, “there are certain palace theologians who ought to be taking notes.”

Peter was kind of out of his depth here, but at least she sounded like she was enjoying herself for once. “Honestly? I think you like dresses and that’s the only role that’s ever let you wear one. It probably doesn’t… say anything else.”

Loki cast him an surprised glance. “An interesting perspective. I, ah, don’t know that the people of this planet share your cavalier view.”

They _were_ getting weird looks, Peter noticed. Maybe not entirely for the reasons she thought, though. Loki wasn’t wearing any shoes and also still had scratches down her cheek and neck, and on her bare arms. And he was wearing his full spidey suit with some pants over top. They made for an odd pair.

It reminded him of his lack of shirt, though (and what had happened last night). He did want to go shopping, still, so why not find a cool alien shirt to wear? He looked around for a store that was displaying shirt-like clothing, and spotted several people leaving a huge, brightly lit building with boxes of stuff that looked awfully soft to be anything else.

“Maybe we just need to finish getting dressed,” he said.

Loki glanced down at her feet. “There is that,” she agreed.

He led them into the big store and was greeted by the largest department store he’d ever seen in his _life._ Peter grinned as he looked around at the neverending aisles. “I think maybe they have _everything_ here.”

They did. Peter and Loki weaved their way through everything from an attachment for a kitchen that made drinking water out of humidity in the air, to the _coolest_ remote control plane he had ever seen—you controlled it with your _mind_. Loki used her finger chips to hack into the system and they flew it around the toy section for like 15 minutes before they spotted security headed toward them and ran away, laughing. When they finally found the clothing section, it was divided into way more categories than Earth’s stores tended to be, several of them apparently based on species. The three head-holes in the shirts on one rack was kind of a tip-off, and the tentacled mannequins in some of the more avant garde sections. “I guess you’re probably used to this, huh?” Peter said.

Loki shook her head, looking around them almost in a daze. “Asgard has closed borders,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

They just sort of wandered around until he found a display of tops that had the right number of sleeves and head holes. Or, well. Peter was pretty sure there were sleeves. There was a general head-sized opening in the top, and another opening in the bottom, and then the sides just sort of… very slowly tapered out, until they ended in approximately wrist-sized holes, with little loops sewn in so, he guessed, you could tie them off with little belts. Just, you know, for your wrists. Wrist belts. It was a look, for sure.

He took one off the rack and held it up to himself experimentally, checking himself out in one of the full length mirrors set up in every aisle. He looked sci fi, he was pretty sure. A bit space opera. This was the style of a hip and popular space-pirate.

Hopefully not a _girl_ pirate.

“I think that looks swell on you,” Karen chirped in his ear.

“You look ridiculous,” Loki said, standing behind him in the mirror.

“I shouldn’t get it, then?” He grinned. He _did_ look ridiculous. It was kind of fun, though.

“I didn’t say that,” she said, even if she looked a little like she was already regretting saying so.

Peter thought about it for a second. “I’m gonna go for it,” he said. “Why not? We’re in space. And the fabric’s, like, the softest thing I think I’ve ever touched.” He grabbed a couple more of the shirts and tucked them under one arm. “They’ve gotta have a fitting room around here somewhere,” he told Loki. “I hope. But we can look around some more. Do you wanna get anything?”

Loki was looking around the at the racks and racks of clothes with a stunned expression. “Who were all of these clothes _made_ for?” she asked. “There’s so many. Is this some sort of charity shop, where they put unfulfilled orders?”

Peter was confused. “No, I’m pretty sure it’s a department store. These are just new clothes.”

Loki frowned. “But we just got here, and you weren’t ever measured.”

“Well no. That’s why I’m trying them on first. I have no idea how their sizing system works so I’m getting a small, medium, and a large size for all of these and I’m gonna see which one fits better.” He fished out one of the tags and showed it to Loki, pointing at the small diagram of 10 different shirts, with the third from the left shaded in red. “Anyway, clothes you have to get _measured_ for are, like, _super_ expensive. That’d take up like _all_ of the money I have.” He thought about the ad he’d seen once for custom sized suits. They were supposed to make pretty much anyone look amazing. “Though it’d be pretty cool.”

Loki fingered the shirts on a nearby rack thoughtfully, glancing through the tags on each one. “Oh,” she said. “That’s… new.”

Eventually, after coming upon a shoe section Loki couldn’t find a _single_ _thing_ in that she found acceptable, they found a set of dressing rooms and Peter figured out that, inasmuch as these shirts _had_ sizes, he seemed to be a small, which made him feel better about it being most likely a men’s shirt after all, and finding what was recognizably a women’s section after _that_ sealed the deal for sure. They browsed that section a little, but Loki was visibly uncomfortable, darting worried glances at the other customers periodically. Not that they even seemed to notice the two of them. Peter tried holding up a few things he thought might be to her interest, but she turned her nose up at all of it, declaring the whole section in terrible taste and nothing she would be caught dead wearing. Peter wondered how much of that was true and how much was an excuse to avoid being seen trying any of it on, horror of horrors.  After a few minutes, it was clear there wasn’t much else for them to do here, so they paid for Peter’s shirt and left.

Loki was quiet as they left the store, staring determinedly down at the ground, and Peter headed towards a quiet little alley so he could change in something approximating privacy. After he pulled on his new shirt, he counted out how much money they had. They shouldn’t spend it all tonight, probably, but the shirt had barely made a dent in what he’d taken from the motel.

Then he heard a click behind him, and a gun was a gun, even in space.

Peter froze. The way out of the alley was blocked by a hulking, humanoid figure with smooth, grey-green skin who was pointing a handgun—blaster?—directly at Loki, and Peter’s hands were full.

“You can get out of this real easy,” the alien said to Peter, looking at him for a brief moment without his aim wavering. “Okay? Just give me the money and don’t try anything, and your little girlfriend here,” he sounded a little doubtful, “goes home with you alive.”

Peter glanced around them. There was a rectangular metal thing a little behind the guy, in the alley’s entrance—probably a garbage can or a mail drop or something—that he thought he could knock the guy off balance with, if he could just get a hand free…

The guy clearly realized he was thinking of _something_. “You don’t have a way out here, kid. Don’t try to be a hero.”

Peter was very, _very_ bad at not being a hero—Mr. Stark could confirm!—and he was especially bad at it when he was explicitly told as much. He started to stuff the cash in his pocket so he could use his web shooters, and the guy immediately swung his aim around and shot him.

It felt a little bit like being hit by lighting. He flew backwards, hitting something _hard_ , and everything was for an unclear length of time, very loud and very bright, if only behind his eyelids. He couldn’t _think_. Eventually, he realized he was slumped against the wall of the alley, nearly facedown in a pile of garbage.

_Where was Loki?_

He sat up quickly, and then regretted it when his vision swam and he had to wait it out before he could peer at the scene in front of him, and. Huh. That was… happening.

There was an eerie green glow like smoke coiling around Loki’s bare feet, and as it the glowing smoke thickened and crackled like a self-contained storm, it was like it was stealing the light from everything around it, the shadows around them growing darker and wider with every second.

She had the wannabe mugger up against the other alley wall by his neck, and chest, and wrists all at once, and he strained against an invisible barrier as she stepped towards him, arms loose at her sides.

She was taller than the guy was, Peter realized. He was looking up at her in terror as she got in close to him. She leaned in and was probably saying something to him, but it was too quiet for Peter to hear. Whatever it was, the guy started shaking.

Then she suddenly reached up with one hand and bashed his head into the wall, hard. She adjusted her grip, and did it again. With one hand still on his head, she held the other out and a dagger materialized into it. She wasn’t smiling this time. She looked _furious_ , the kind of furious that had you near tears, and _very much_ like she was about to kill that guy. This was bad. This was really, really, _really_ bad.

“Loki, _stop_!”

Surprisingly, she did. She glanced back at Peter, and it was like he could see her shoving all that anger back down in the space of an instant, until it was like she didn’t have any emotions at all. “Did you want me to leave some for you?” she asked casually.

“ _No!_ I want you to not hurt him!”

She faltered. “He shot you,” she said, a little too blank to really look confused.

“I know!” Peter said. “I was there! And that was bad, he’s—he’s a bad person. But we can, like… I don’t know, tie him up and leave him for whoever is the police here.”

“That’s a terrible plan.”

“It’s a better plan than _killing_ him!” Peter picked himself up off the ground, a little shakily. “Okay, uh. How about this.” He waved her off of the mugger, who was staring at them in stunned terror—and _she_ was staring at him just plain old _stunned_ —and said, “Listen. My friend and I here don’t want to hurt you, but you’re hurting a lot of people. You can’t just go around stealing stuff, and you _definitely_ can’t go around _shooting_ people. But if you promise to stop, we’ll let you go.”

Loki stared at him. “ _That’s_ your idea? That’s even worse. He's just going to mug someone else as soon as he’s out of sight. If we kill him, he won’t hurt anyone ever again. Aren’t you supposed to want to keep people safe?”

Peter turned and looked her right in the eye. " _Everyone_ deserves a second chance," he said. She frowned at him, but he held his ground. She seemed to realize something as she searched his face. That oddly blank look on her face easing, and underneath was something Peter didn’t really know how to describe. There was a scrape from beside them, then—but way farther away than the mugger should be. They both turned to find the mugger bolting down the back of the alley, vanishing very quickly from sight.

Peter stared at the alley the would-be mugger had disappeared into, and then at Loki, who sort of looked like she wanted to go after him. His heart was beating so fast he thought it might beat right out of his chest, physical possibility be damned. “Hey,” he said softly, “let’s—how about we get something to eat?”

Something shifted in her stance, and in her carefully-blank face, and suddenly the air shimmered and there was no more glowing mist at her feet, and the shadows in the alley were just normal shadows.

Illusions. It was only illusions.

 _They were the ones who insisted that mere illusions couldn’t_ possibly _win a battle. I was merely demonstrating why they were wrong. You would think_ proper warriors _would be able to take more punishment before fleeing._

⁂

They found a small café that had outdoor seating—Loki not having shoes turned out to be kind of a problem, once they were trying to get into establishments that had enough employees for the square footage—and were sure to actually ask what was on the menu before they ordered, this time. Peter got a weird, but tasty, sort of pasta dinner, and Loki got a leg of something that seemed about rabbit-sized and smelled of strong spices, which she picked up whole and tore pieces off of with her teeth. Peter figured her her fingers were probably still pretty sore, regardless of how alarming fast she was healing. The bruise on her cheek was fading to yellow now.

They didn’t talk about the mugger, or about whatever Loki had seen in Peter’s face. They didn’t talk about the fact she listened to him when he told her to stop. Instead, they made small talk about what Loki knew about this planet based on a collection of movies she’d only half-watched, and about the movies that humans had about space. Peter had seen a lot of them, and had opinions.

As they finished up their dinner, Peter noticed Loki kept darting glances at a nearby store. It was one of those tiny, specialized clothing stores, the really expensive kind. In the window there were three dresses hanging off of brilliant maroon mannequins. They all had what looked like corsets around the waist and different combinations of pinned-up layers going into the floor-length skirts. The one on the right had ruffles through the top. He didn’t really see the appeal, but every time Loki glanced over she looked just a few seconds longer, and then she turned back to her food with a little sigh.

“You know,” Peter suggested, “we could go in.”

Loki looked at him doubtfully.

“Look at it this way,” he told her. “This city is _huge._ And we’re gonna be leaving soon. You’ll probably _never_ see those people again, so it doesn’t really matter what they think of you. _And_ we have money, so it’s their _job_ to help us.”

Loki took another bite of her space rabbit, but she seemed to be thinking about it. She glanced at the store again, and her expression firmed into something determined.

“I suppose you’ll object to me killing them if they misstep,” she said lightly, and Peter _really_ hoped that was a joke.

“Yeah, probably,” he said.

This store was _much_ smaller than the department store; Peter could see the back wall from the entrance. The whole place gave off an energy that made Peter squirm—the kind of fashion-industry femininity that had half his friends trying to go on diets before they’d hit puberty, combined with a total lack of prices displayed anywhere that usually told him he couldn’t afford anything they had to offer. Racks of dresses were hung carefully along the walls and on blue and red mannequins. Almost as soon as they’d entered, a short humanoid woman with pale skin that was too pink to be human and an elaborate hairdo that sat 6 inches above her head walked up to them and politely asked them if she could help them find anything. She glanced over Peter and then lingered on Loki, in her bare feet and her dress that Peter noticed hung in a way that somehow _emphasized_ the straight lines of her body.

Peter looked at Loki, who was glancing anywhere but at the employee and looked a little bit like she was either going to bolt or try to stab her. He stepped in, hoping he was doing this right. “Yeah, thanks,” he told the lady. “My friend really likes the dresses you have here and we were hoping we could look around. We have money,” he added, maybe a little too defensively.

The employee lady didn’t really seem impressed. “I see,” she said, and then gave Loki a tight smile she didn’t look up to meet. “I’m not sure any of our dresses will _fit_ you, I’m afraid.”

That didn’t seem true, to Peter—this was, like, designer, wasn’t it? It _looked_ designer, and he’d watched some of Fashion Week with Aunt May: none of the girls who walked down the runway had curves, either. But _they_ were cis.

“We could take them in,” he supplied, when Loki showed no signs of looking up from the point on the floor she was studying, never mind responding. She worried at her lower lip. “Right?”

The employee looked pained. “Our tailor _could_ , possibly, but I’m really not sure how much could be done, and I really _doubt_ you could afford the work necessary…”

Oh, they were _that_ kind of expensive. He’d just been thinking, buy it now and look up a YouTube tutorial later. “Listen,” he said, a little sharper than he’d really intended. “Can’t we just look around? It’s not like it’s hurting anybody, and there aren’t any customers in here right now for us to scare off. If we see something we’re interested in, then we can talk about money, okay?”

“I don’t like your tone, young man—”

“If you’re that desperate to avoid making money,” Loki said coldly, cutting the pink lady off, “we can just leave.” Her whole body was tense.

“You’re allowed to be here, Loki,” Peter told her. Then he sighed. This had been _his_ idea, not hers, hadn’t it? “But if you really want to go, we can. I’m sorry.”

There was a crash from the other end of the store. A woman with scaly green skin, pointed elf-ears, and straight black hair hastily picked up the dresses and hangers she’d dropped and hurried in their direction. She looked Loki up and down, completely ignoring Peter, and then stared into her face for a long moment. She hugged the dresses in her arms a bit tighter to herself. “Hi, sorry, did you say _Loki?_ King Odin’s concubine? Wow, oh wow, you look just like the paintings.”

King Odin’s _what?_ Peter’s heart jumped straight into his throat for half a second, before he realized that the alien woman had to be talking about the _other_ Loki, the one who was dead. What had Loki called her, her ‘namesake’? “Actually—” he started, but Loki cut him off, stepping forward.

“I’m not particularly fond of announcing my presence,” she said, still tense and _clearly_ anxious being here at all, but her voice was smooth and professional. She’d slipped into a role. “You understand.”

“Right, right, of course,” the woman said. She was looking at Loki sort of like Peter remembered looking at Santa Claus when he’d met him at the mall for the first time: amazement, joy, and _total_ disbelief, because why would _Santa_ _Claus_ come all the way to a mall in New York? It didn’t make any sense. “I had no idea our little shop had come to King Odin’s attention.”

“Oh, not your store, specifically,” Loki said airily. “My Lord Odin—” and it was a little like she was caught between laughter and disgust “—sent us here on a small errand, to assess the skills of some of the tailors here. You’re merely a stop along the way. But if you feel you aren’t up to the task…”

The words were perfectly confident, and the right shade of haughty, and maybe if she’d _come in_ that confident they’d have believed her. But the pink lady scoffed. “Right,” she said, “because of _all_ _the stores in the city_ , gleaming Asgard is interested in the one that sells knockoffs of last year’s fashions and whose lead tailor only graduated seven months ago. No offense, Pel,” she added.

Pel shrugged. She looked back at Loki, and then to Peter, and her gaze was suddenly calculating. “You know,” she said to Loki, “we studied you in my design class. Well, not _you,_ so much as your dress. I’ve always wanted to see it up close.”

Loki looked down at it. “It’s nothing special,” she said.

“Maybe not to _you_ ,” Pel said. “You probably have dozens just like it. But I’ve never seen a genuine Asgardian-made dress before. Nobody has. It’s _priceless_. So, how about a trade?”

Loki stared at her. “What?”

“A trade,” Pel repeated. “You give me that ‘nothing special’ dress, and _I’ll_ pretend you’re actually here on official business. I’ll even give you a free fitting. I’m nice like that,” she said, not very nicely, in Peter’s opinion. “Does Odin know you’ve got a boyfriend?”

Loki kept staring.

“You’re not going to get a better offer.” Pel crossed her arms and stared Loki down with all the confidence of someone who knew she was better than you and had something you _desperately_ wanted and didn’t really deserve.

“ _No_!” Loki finally managed. “This is _all_ I _have_ , I certainly won’t be giving it to _you_.” Peter put a comforting hand on her shoulder. It felt a little like touching synthetic flesh; it was the right texture, but cool to the touch, almost room temperature. People _were_ red.

Pel looked at her in surprise, shocked at the revelation. Peter was pretty shocked she’d said it, too. He figured it would have filed under ‘vulnerabilities’.

“Let’s go,” he said quietly. “I’m really sorry I pushed you into this.

The pink lady was throwing Pel a weird glance, mouth half-open, looking like she couldn’t decide if she was happy they were leaving after all or furious with the tailor for chasing them off, and like she couldn’t decide if she should intercede.

“Wait,” Pel said, “don’t go.” Her expression was tight and unhappy, lips pursed, and she looked Loki up and down again, eyes falling to her dirty, bare feet and the awkwardly short hem of her skirt, skimming over the still-healing cuts on her arms, alighting on the barely-there bruise high on her cheekbone. Peter wondered how badly they were accidentally misrepresenting Loki’s namesake. He hoped she owned _shoes_ , at least. “I misjudged your… situation,” the tailor continued uncomfortably. Peter hoped, a little meanly, that she felt bad about it. “I didn’t mean to—listen, can’t I just _look_ at it? Take some photos.”

Wow, she couldn’t even finish a whole apology. Her boss cut in, voice bright even as she wore her annoyance—it was impossible to tell at who—on her face. “We’d be happy to help you two find something. My name is Yan-Toll, by the way.”

Peter waited for Loki’s decision; she glanced at him and sighed. “All right,” she said.

Pel _beamed_ and beckoned Loki over to a brightly lit corner of the store which had a small white pedestal in the center, with several full-length mirrors on one side of it and a white paper backdrop up on the other wall. “Up, up,” Pel ordered Loki excitedly to step onto the pedestal, as she fiddled with a large, high-tech looking camera on a tripod pointed towards the white backdrop. She kept giving Loki little orders, about where to put her hands, how to stand, if she should turn, how she should hold her head, and she was getting more and more excited the whole time, murmuring to herself as she snapped photos. Peter looked on, feeling as uncomfortable as Loki looked.

“Oh,” Pel breathed a few minutes in, “I wish I could photograph you with the mask. Do you have it?”

Mask?

“I do,” Loki said blandly.

“Well, go on!”

“Why?”

Pel didn’t seem to have a response to that. “I’ll still do the fitting for free! Any necessary alterations! Anything you _want_ ! I’ll—I’ll even give you a discount on the dress!” She sounded desperate enough at this point it didn’t even come off with an unsaid _you’ll probably need it_. Even though that’d be fair. Peter still hadn’t found a single price tag, and it was kind of stressing him out.

Peter leaned in, remembering that Loki was only vaguely aware of the existence of money.  “That’s a good deal, by the way. Ask for, like, 40% off. We’d probably get it. But only if you want.” Pel was ordering her around enough.

Loki glanced at him and her face visibly smoothed over in preparation of some act. “A free fitting, and 40% discount on _any_ dress I choose.” She turned and looked at the pink lady, Yan-Toll, eyebrows raised inquiringly.

Yan-Toll was watching this all with her arms crossed. She looked at Pel and said, “The discount is coming out of your pocket.”

Pel blanched, but nodded. Wow. Loki twisted her wrist sharply in a half-circle, and when the motion was finished, a plain, featureless white mask was in her hand. It shone a little bit, like it might have been made of glossy porcelain.

One of Pel’s hands drifted toward the mask absently before she snatched it back and hurriedly returned to her camera. More directions followed; place the mask on the side of her head, over her eyes, stand like so. Peter looked at the mask as she posed, and its wide eye holes, so big they looked almost skeletal, and then at the faded embroidery of sinister, fantastical creatures on her dress and he had a feeling the two things fit together somehow. Which made sense, he figured, since ‘the mask’ was clearly an important part of those paintings of Loki’s namesake, if Pel knew about it.

It seemed to go quickly, as if Pel was worried the mask would disappear again if she took too long. After that, Pel pointed over to the store’s singular fitting room, a little area that had walls on three sides so it was partially open but concealed from the window front. She wanted to be able to take more photos of the dress’ details—the construction of the seams and stuff, Peter figured—while Loki was shopping, so she gave Loki a flowery sundress to change into; it was made of a slippery-looking sleek material almost like silk, and probably cost a fortune. That left Peter to awkwardly turn away and try to ignore the sound of rustling clothes and the but-I- _could_ impulse to peek as he waited for her to change. Loki clearly cared about her privacy; for all Peter knew, she was changing under an illusion again, anyway.

As she was busy, Yan-Toll pulled Pel aside. “You are _so lucky_ ,” she hissed. “Do you understand the meaning of the words ‘customer service’? Did you _sleep_ through the training workshop you completed _specifically_ to prevent incidents like this? We _discourage_ people who don’t have the means to pay, and they leave on their own. We don’t _threaten_ them. Imagine what might have happened if that incident _got back to management?_ Or, gods forbid, _Asgard_? Even if they aren't authorized to be here, do you really think the king would take that insult kindly? Both our careers could have been _ruined_.”

Both of them looked over as Loki stepped out of the fitting room. Yan-Toll gave Pel a gentle push forward, hissing “Be _nice,_ ” to her. Pel cleared her throat and, like she was reading off cue cards, said, “I really appreciate you letting me look at this, it’s very generous of you.” She paused. “And I am in your debt.”

Loki didn’t respond. She was holding the green dress neatly folded in both hands. When Pel went to take it from her, Loki hesitated and then gently laid it in her hands. Pel handled it like it might disintegrate at any moment and backed away. Peter looked between them.

“Um,” he said to Loki. “I could watch her, if you wanted.” It’d mean Loki’d be on her own in the store. Not that Peter would be much help picking out dresses, but he was pretty good at the moral support bit. “Or go with you.”

Loki hesitated, clearly weighing her options. “That would be… very kind of you,” she said finally.

“Um,” Peter said.

The realization dawned in her eyes. “Watching her would be greatly appreciated,” she clarified.

And that was how Peter spent the next, like, _hour_ sitting on a stool while a green girl went over his friend’s dress with a fine tooth comb—metaphorically—and magnifying glass—very, _very_ literally. Several times, she carefully angled a camera on her outstretched arm so she could photograph some stitch through the lens of the magnifying glass.

She took a _lot_ of photos, murmuring to herself some more the whole time about things like ‘top’ and ‘carding’. Peter had to intercept when she tried to take a tiny pair of scissors to the inside edge of the skirt’s hem, and she just about _hissed_ at him over it. But she put the scissors down, and just picked a few fraying threads instead, carefully folding them into the pages of a thick book on her table.

Yan-Toll and Loki were having a clearly _extensive_ conversation the whole time they walked around the shop, Yan-Toll pulling dresses off the racks and hanging them on display hooks occasionally, as the two of them fingered the skirts, or took measurements of Loki’s waist in tiny, tiny increments, because that was… important somehow, presumably. Loki seemed a little overwhelmed, but Yan-Toll answered all of the questions she had, and seemed to be suggesting various cuts and explaining how they’d do various things to her figure, and didn’t even wince too much at the tracks Loki’s muddy feet were leaving on her floor, even though she super clearly wanted to.

They bundled past Pel and Peter three times with this little rolling rack of dresses, because apparently they were too good for just… holding them, here, like _normal_ people. Peter again carefully Did Not Watch as Loki tried each of them on in turn—and felt some vindication on Loki’s behalf, because the dresses in the storefront were all ‘display _’_ , apparently, to use as reference for proper fittings and made in the smallest sizes, and Yan-Toll had been spouting some prime bullshit earlier for _sure_ , because from the sound of the two of them, while there would need to be alterations, everything seemed to fit pretty great on her. Finally, after a solid five minutes talking about how the fabric fell on whatever she was wearing now, Yan-Toll called Pel over.

The dress Loki was wearing when the two of them came over was made of a shimmering material that looked like it changed colors as the light hit it different ways, and it had a weird gradient effect where the skirts were like a very dark gray or black that shimmered and shifted into a shiny pewter, but the fabric at the neckline was such a light silver-gray you could barely tell it was changing colors. It had a stiff, boned corset in a deep, matte purpleish-red—or, at least, he thought it was a corset; he'd never seen a corset in real life before, but all the ones in pictures went all the way up the chest, and this one only went about halfway up her ribcage—that cinched tight around her waist with glossy ribbons the same color. The loose, silky material of the dress draped over the top of the corset and the long, swishing skirt was loose, too, with a bunch of folded up layers draped kind of like a toga. Yan-Toll was fussing with the layers even as Pel came over and took out a truly terrifying number of needles, saying something about how the dress gave ‘definition’ to her narrow waist and ‘an illusion of potential curves’ for a ‘more feminine effect’. Peter didn’t really like how she was talking about it, like there was something _wrong_ with her figure, but also Loki looked _amazing_. She looked like she could have been on the cover of some fancy fashion magazine. And Peter would buy it, even though he didn't even read magazines, because _wow_.

Pel ordered Loki around a little more—to tie up her hair and put her arms out at her sides like she was T-posing—and Peter made eye contact with her as she stiffly tolerated the tailor doing complicated and arcane things with about a million tiny pins and a sewing needle. She was blinking rapidly, and Peter realized she was trying to keep tears from falling. Oh.

“You okay?” he mouthed.

Loki gave him a tiny nod, a tear tracking down her cheek. People didn’t usually cry when they were totally okay, but if she wasn’t gonna say anything he didn’t know if there was anything he could do right now. He’d have wondered if she was getting poked with the needles if she hadn’t, like, _stabbed_ herself several times yesterday without flinching.

“Is everything all right?” asked Yan-Toll with badly-hidden concern. Pel looked up, too.

“It’s—it’s fine,” Loki said, in barely a whisper. “I don’t know why I’m crying. Ignore me.” She breathed a wavering laugh.

Yan-Toll leaned back, clearly pleased with herself. “You’re _happy_ ,” she informed her. “You might not be familiar with the sensation.” It might have been mean, but she was smiling a little.

“Oh,” Loki said weakly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **eta 4/2019** : [fanart](http://companionsofusall.tumblr.com/post/184172542678/id-fanart-of-loki-from-patrexes-and)!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Not everyone is secretly some sad little wilting flower under the evil."
> 
> “No,” Peter said, “she’s a person under there. And no offense, sir, but you're not really in a position to know what this is like.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaand, we're back! Delay brought to you by the onset of winter, an impending marriage, and several major exams.
> 
> Quite a bit more explanation of some of the worldbuilding brought in in the last chapter is available [here](https://patrex.es/post/178253651690). It's not strictly relevant to the plot, but if you wanted to know more about Asgardian religion and slavery in this 'verse, you'll find it interesting.

They made it three feet past the door before the room lights suddenly switched on to reveal Mr. Stark in full Iron Man costume sitting on one of the motel room chairs, arms crossed, visor down. “Did you have a good time?”

Peter felt his stomach drop to somewhere just below his knees. Busted. He straightened out and started casting about desperately for some sort of explanation that would sound, like. Responsible and stuff.

“It was certainly memorable,” Loki said casually, a smile playing at her lips, looking for all the world like she and Mr. Stark were two great friends catching up at the end of the day. Peter eyed her nervously. She realized they were in trouble right now, right? “And your—” her eyes flicked up skyward as she decided on “—evening?”

Mr. Stark’s breath came out in a scoff. “Yeah, we’re not playing that shit, thank you.”

She shrugged with a _what can you do?_ look on her face and sat down across from him in the other chair, angling her elbow behind her on its low back like it was way more comfortable than it actually was. Peter’d sat in it that morning, and it was _not_. It was sort of like if you made a chair seat out of slightly rough brick, at exactly the right angle that you felt like you were constantly sliding off it, and then put it on ‘ergonomic’ springs.

She leaned back in it and raised an eyebrow. “What’s with the hostility?” she asked, in an impressively bad attempt at an American accent. At _Mr. Stark's_ accent.

Oh no. She was _needling_ him. Peter cleared his throat, probably too loudly, and when both of them turned to stare at him pushed on, even though he really didn’t want to. The combined pressure of both their stares was so palpable he could have measured it in Pascals. “I know you said to stay in the room, sir, but in our defense it’s not like staying in the room was _helping_ , and this way we, uh, blend in better. And, you know, might have come across someone who could help. Can’t do that if we don’t meet people.”

“Oh,” Mr. Stark said, fake-agreeably. He and Loki were a lot alike that way, but probably neither of them wanted to hear that. “So that’s what all this is, huh? Blending in? How much of our _only money_ did you spend ‘blending in’?” The quotation marks were audible.

“Not that much, really! We got a really good deal. We ended up at this store, and I was worried for a second—because I didn’t want to spend more money than we needed to—because it didn’t have any price tags, and they had their own tailor for fitting stuff. You probably buy stuff like that all the time but it was kind of new to me. But it turns out Loki’s the reincarnation of a really famous s—”

“We were given ‘40% off’,” Loki cut in sharply and loudly, causing Peter to trail off. “I’m told this is very good.”

“Really famous what?” Mr. Stark sounded suddenly suspicious. Peter bit his lip. Loki clearly didn’t want Mr. Stark knowing that, and he should have thought of that.

“Nothing of importance. The seamstress simply thought she’d seen a depiction of my clothes in a painting once, and wished to see the superior quality of Asgardian construction. A common enough reaction from someone in a developing culture. In any case, she compensated us for our time and the favor.”

“…Sure, whatever. See, the thing is, I seem to recall that I _specifically_ told you to stay inside, and _not_ go out and play dress-up. This is a recon mission, not a Halloween costume party.”

Peter looked down at his shirt and conceded that it was a fair description, probably. He _was_ going for the pirate look. He glanced over at Loki when she stood up suddenly, but her expression was totally blank.

“Your objection is noted,” she said stiffly, and then she retreated to the bed. Peter hesitated, and then Mr. Stark sighed.

“Did you spend all the money?” he asked. Peter handed him over what he had left, which Mr. Stark gave maybe a two-second glance, _tops_ , before dropping it on the table next to him. “Great. That’s fine. Never do that again, et cetera. I’m going to figure out if this planet has delivery, do you guys want food?”

There was no response from the bed, but Peter’s stomach chose that moment to gurgle very obviously in the sudden silence.

“Gonna take that as a yes. Great.” Mr. Stark got up and started to walk toward the door. Peter glanced back at Loki, who was studiously not looking at either of them, one more time before trotting after him.

“Hey, uh,” he started. Mr. Stark made an absent noise. Peter wasn’t entirely sure he was listening but he figured that was the best he’d get, so he continued. “So, uh. I got Loki that dress because I think everyone else forgot her birthday, and I wanted to do something nice for her. And it was kind of a big deal. Like, a _really_ big deal. She’s never been allowed to wear clothes she really liked before, you know? Anyway, I think she’s kind of insecure about it. And it’d be great if you could, I don’t know, compliment her, or something? Maybe? Or at least not call it a Halloween costume.”

Mr. Stark was quiet for a second. Then he said, “Kid, I think you’re reading too much into this. She thinks we're all bugs or something, right? A cockroach just talked back to her and didn't call her 'ma'am'. So she got all prickly. Trust me, I've seen it happen before. Not everyone is secretly some sad little wilting flower under the evil."

“No,” Peter said, “she’s a person under there. And no offense, sir, but you're not really in a position to know what this is like.”

Mr. Stark stopped in the middle of the parking lot and stared at him, and Peter held his ground even though Mr. Stark staring at you was kind of an intimidating scenario. Peter was getting a lot of practice at it.

“Really, kid? You’re pulling that card? She’s trans, so you’re the expert on everything she’s thinking? I hate to break it to you, kid, but you two are _very_ different people.”

“Maybe,” Peter allowed, “but at least I’ve _talked_ to her. You don’t even care what she’s actually thinking.”

Mr. Stark made a noise in disbelief. “Yeah,” he said, “I don’t. So sue me. She came to Earth eight years ago with an army, working for the guy who’s trying to destroy the whole Universe right now. You ever think about that? She was going to kill all of us. She didn’t care. Hell, she _still_ doesn’t care. So I’m sure as hell not gonna shed a tear for her _feelings_.”

The motel room they were standing in front of slid its blinds into place. “Have _you_ ever thought about whether she had a choice?” Peter shot back. She hadn’t exactly _talked_ about it, and he had no idea if he wasn’t totally off-base, but she needed somebody in her corner. “You know how scared she is of Thanos. You know what happened when Thanos’ agent guy had her two days ago! Who knows what he did to her to get her to fight for him! Maybe he threatened Asgard if she wouldn’t! If you had a choice between Earth or Asgard, which one would _you_ choose?”

“I wouldn’t invade a planet! Even if Thanos strong-armed her into it somehow, I’ve _been_ there. And I fought back. I didn’t do what the bad guys wanted. You’re trying to tell me that because some people were _mean_ to her, we should all be fine with what she almost did to us? That the families of the people she killed should just forgive her?”

Peter took a deep breath. He was almost shaking. “Should the families of everybody you've killed forgive _you?_ ”

“No. Absolutely not. And it was not okay. Why do you think I’ve spent the last ten years trying to make up for it?”

“You _still_ kill people! You defended her when _she_ did! You just don’t think about it because you call them the bad guys! Just like you called the people the government killed with your weapons the bad guys.” He really _was_ shaking now. He’d been thinking about this for the better part of a year, really _thinking_ about what it was that Mr. Stark did and what _he_ wanted to be. About Liz’s dad. This wasn’t really how he’d hoped to bring it up. “Superpowers doesn’t make them not people. It doesn’t make _Loki_ not a person. If you get a chance to be better, then so does she! You did a lot worse to Earth than she did, anyway.”

Mr. Stark opened his mouth to reply but Peter wasn’t done. “ _And_ , she’s helping us _now_. She totally believes he’s going to win, and she’s still fighting! She’s still trying! Don’t you think maybe she’s trying to make up for what _she_ did?”

“You seriously think she’s doing this as some kind of _penance?_ At _best_ , she’s trying to stay alive. The second helping us isn’t the best way to do that? She’s gone.”

“Maybe. Maybe you could _ask_ her! But maybe you’re right, and she’s— _just_ —trying to stay alive. Does that make someone evil? Would you be happier if she _didn’t_ want to live? If she leaves once she’s helped save the Universe, I wouldn’t blame her for it. Her brother thinks she’s a freak; _you_ just said she’s playing dress up; most of the people around her back home think she should just do everyone a favor and kill herself. She’s only a couple months older than me, and I don’t think she thinks anybody actually wants her to exist. Not as _herself_ , anyway. And as far as I can tell? She isn’t even wrong. If she wants to go after this, I think I might help her.”

“Fuck, kid. I just made a _joke._ I wasn’t telling her to _commit suicide._ ” Mr. Stark shook his head, and then they cleared a corner and the front desk was directly in front of them. “I’ll think about it, okay? What do you want to eat?”

It turned out it didn’t really matter what they wanted to eat, because neither of them recognized any of the words the manager spouted off as common delivery foods. Mr. Stark ended up placing an order for something that had the word ‘poultry’ in the description, and they walked back to their room in awkward silence.

⁂

Loki kept herself locked in the bathroom until the food came, even though Peter knocked on the door at _least_ three times. On the one hand this _clearly_ proved his point to Mr. Stark, and he gave the man several very pointed looks that he hoped drove that home, but on the other hand he _really_ needed to pee. By the time the deliveryperson arrived, he was strongly considering just going outside, like they did in the olden days, but Mr. Stark slammed the side of his fist hard against the bathroom door as he walked past it, and as he pulled containers of a weird alien cuisine out of the plastic bag they’d come in and set them out on the table, the door creaked open.

Loki was back in her Asgardian clothes, the black woolen tunic outfit. Peter decided he’d address it in a minute, and rushed past her, almost slamming the door behind him.

Through the thin wall he could hear Mr. Stark go, “Woah, hey, Princess, where’s the gown?”

Loki didn’t respond. Somehow, Peter didn’t think that was the right thing to say just then. _Weird_. How long would it take for Mr. Stark to catch a hint? Cis people, _honestly_. The total worst, sometimes. He finished up in the bathroom—the sink took some figuring out, you hit a button with your elbow to turn it on, and only went for a couple seconds, but he managed—and went back out into the main room.

It was, uh, _tense_. Loki had several of what looked like… purple egg rolls?… sitting in front of her and was methodically taking apart the first one to pick through its contents. She was not looking at Mr. Stark, who was alternating between prodding at his own egg roll and peering at Loki like he _really badly_ wanted to say something and just hadn’t decided on what yet. Hopefully nothing too bad. Peter winced a little, and edged into his own seat.

He wondered if the purple things would actually _taste_ like egg rolls. It was possible. Like. Statistically, if there were infinite universes, there was a universe out there where these egg rolls tasted exactly like the ones he could get down the block at the local American Chinese place. He sniffed one and took a bite.

They didn’t.

“You know,” Mr. Stark said, his tone a little too desperate to be casual, “these are actually pretty good! What do you think?”

Peter figured it wasn’t _bad_ , but it was too unfamiliar a flavor to say anything else. “Very fresh,” he offered.

Mr. Stark looked over at Loki, who had separated the bigger pieces inside the roll into small piles and was tasting each kind gingerly. “You are _seriously_ dedicated to not eating your vegetables, huh. They’re good for you, y’know. Vitamins. Helps with depression.” He looked very uncharacteristically uncertain, like giving parental advice was something he watched a YouTube video on once and he was trying to remember the details. Peter’d gotten very familiar with that vibe. “Sure as hell wouldn’t _hurt_ , anyway,” he muttered.

Loki gave Mr. Stark a sullen look, and then she picked up the other half of the egg roll and jammed half of it into her mouth at once.

“Okay. Uh. Good.”

She looked disgusted. Peter thought she might spit it out, to be honest, but she chewed and swallowed, and then she picked up another one.

“Well, anyway,” said Mr. Stark after a while, leaning back a little in his seat. “While you kids were out on the town, I got some tips from those Ravager guys. One of them even said he’d pass on a line to whoever the Guardians of the Galaxy are, and I’ll give it, eh, seventy percent chance he follows through, if he remembers it when he sobers up.”

“That’s good!” Peter said. Really good, considering they’d started the day out with literally nothing, not even familiarity with the _planet_. They were gonna pull this off. “Did you get anything else?”

“Well,” Mr. Stark said. “Some names, I think. A lot more gossip. A really nice run with one of the girls at the bar—”

“Ew.”

Mr. Stark rolled his eyes up, exhale catching on a laugh. “Hit puberty and then get back to me.” He tapped his finger rapidly on the table and then addressed Loki, “So I’m wondering if you recognize any of the names they gave me. I’ve got a list.” He fished it out of the pocket of his jeans and shoved it across the table—it was scrawled on a crumpled paper napkin printed with the logo ‘Kaf’s Grub + Girls’.

Loki stared at it for a minute. She shrugged her shoulders and dropped her eyes to her remaining egg rolls.

“It’s literally upside down. You didn’t even look at the names.”

“I don’t see how much help I’ll be, given I only know of this place from mass entertainment.” She tore a piece of egg roll off and held it up for a second, looking vaguely nauseous.

“Oh, come on, you’re fucking royalty,” Mr. Stark insisted. “You’ve got to know _something_ about the outside world. Politics, at least.”

Loki’s lips thinned into something kind of smile-adjacent for a second. “I never particularly paid attention.” But after she put the egg roll in her mouth, she spun the napkin around to read it. “No,” she said. “I don’t know any of these names. ‘Mar-Vell’ is Kree in origin, however. So that’s down to only… a dozen planets, perhaps. Not counting Kree who’ve immigrated elsewhere.” She blinked at Mr. Stark expectantly.

Mr. Stark sighed. “Right,” he said. “Figures. Look, let’s… get some rest, and we can figure out where to go in the morning. Whole day ahead of us. And, uh.” He looked awkward again. “Don’t worry about the money. We can get more, I guess, if we need to.”

“ _Sleep_? But we just did that.” Peter pointed out. They’d slept, like, six whole hours. He usually only got that on weekends. And they’d barely done anything.

“We did that five hours ago, after what was—” he cast a searching look “—at _least_ a 20 hour day. _I’m_ getting a nap in. You do whatever you want, but don’t come crying to me tomorrow when you can’t keep your eyes open and it’s only the afternoon.”

Peter was about to respond when Loki let out a quiet ‘damn it’ and pushed herself away from the table abruptly, bolting to the bathroom.

Mr. Stark threw up his arms. “Oh come on, what did I say _this_ time?”

Peter looked worriedly after her. The door was already beginning to slide closed behind her with a soft whirr. “I don’t know. Do you think she’s alright?”

“I thought you were the resident expert on her,” Mr. Stark muttered, before getting up. He went over to the bathroom door and knocked on it. “Are you doing something nefarious in there?”

“ _No,_ ” came from behind the bathroom door. “What could I even _do_ with this room? Go _away._ ”

Mr. Stark got a thoughtful look. “Lots of stuff. Like, for starters—”

“Don’t you ever shut your—” She cut off suddenly with a horrid retching sound.

“Loki? Are you okay?” Peter asked worriedly. There was no response for a moment, and then he could hear a quiet moan. “Hey, uh, I’m coming in, okay?” He didn’t think he should just go in without _some_ kind of warning. What if she wasn’t decent? Unlikely, but possible!

She made a faint sound that, well, it _might_ have been in answer. He was counting it good enough. He found the little indent for the door much more quickly than he had the first time he’d used this, and the door slid open again. The bathroom wasn’t large; there was a mostly-recognizable sink and a futuristic toilet-thing just a few steps in from the door, and then a mottled glass door that led to the cramped not-a-shower. Loki was slumped between the sink and the toilet, wiping her mouth with one hand and glaring at them. There were small globs of… something on the ends of her hair, just by her shoulders. Gross. Also worrying? He pointed at her accusatorily.

“There _is_ something wrong.”

Mr. Stark edged in beside him, not that there was a lot of room for it. Not even enough for Peter to sit down next to Loki. He just kind of… hovered over her awkwardly, halfway bent over, not sure what to do.

She leaned back over the toilet and gagged for a bit, without it doing much. Her hair kept falling into her face. Oh, _gross_. Should he—? “I’m gonna,” he said, and pulled her hair back with the webbing between his thumbs and pointer fingers, trying not to touch any of the vomit.

“Should we all be worried about food poisoning?” Mr. Stark asked. He looked a little concerned, and annoyed at himself for being concerned. “Or do you just have a weak stomach?”

Loki made a miserable noise, and spit a mouthful of chunky reddish goop. Peter glared at him, although he _was_ now a little bit worried about food poisoning. Did he feel sick? He couldn’t tell if that bit of nausea was from watching someone throw up or maybe something else.

“I’m not _weak_ ,” she said hoarsely. “It’s—” she rolled her eyes and gestured vaguely with one hand, a ‘do I have to spell it out for you’ kind of thing. She kind of did. Peter had no idea what was going on. “Vegetables.” He’d have said he’d never heard someone say the word with that much _hate_ before, but that wasn’t true. He’d been a child before. He’d had friends. He’d been friends with people as a child. Multiple, even. _And_ had school lunches. Everyone in public school knew the only acceptable vegetable was pizza.

As far as he knew nobody had actually been _sick_ over carrots, though.

Mr. Stark cast a look into the toilet bowl. A brave man, truly. “That’s blood,” he said. “I don’t think vegetables do that, kid.”

Loki shrugged. “And yet.” She sounded resigned.

Peter remembered their earlier meals; if it looked like it might have had roots once, she avoided it like the plague. Oh, god, what was that _word_. “You’re an, an obligate carnivore, aren’t you?” he said excitedly. That was _so cool_. Aliens! The _best!_ “Can I look at your teeth? Is that a weird question?” They _were_ kind of sitting in a bathroom awkwardly while he held her hair. This might be a post hair-holding question. “Sorry. Uh.” He didn’t really have anywhere else to take this conversation.

Mr. Stark crossed his arms and leaned back against the bathroom wall, looking at Loki. A more articulate person’s internal monologue probably would have called his expression _pondering._  “Okay, so, just—let me hammer this out. You knew eating this stuff would literally make you throw up blood. And you ate it anyway? Because I said some bullshit about veggies being good for you? I _am_ following this right, yeah?”

Loki glared up at him without responding.

“Uh-huh.” Mr. Stark’s face took a sharp left past alarm and landed on a weird, uneasy expression. “You… you _do_ know I was trying to be, like, a responsible—fake space dad, or whatever? I wasn’t trying to kill you. Or—or hurt you.”

Loki genuinely _laughed_. It was a very mean-spirited kind of laugh. “Because we’re all the best of friends now?”

“No,” Mr. Stark said. “I don’t like you. But we’re on the same team right now. And _I_ don’t get off on hurting my allies. Or anybody, for that matter. It’s a pretty good life strategy. Maybe you should—” And then he kind of stopped, and visibly shook himself. “God, I’m shit at this,” he said. “Look, kid. No. I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I’m not _going_ to try to hurt you, ever, unless you do something to deserve it. Something new, I mean. Don’t stab us in the back, is what I’m trying to say here, and we’ll be cool.”

Peter was watching Loki’s face, and he _saw_ the surprise and distrust that was smoothly hidden by a cruel little smirk. He kicked her, gently but pointedly, before she could voice whatever comeback she’d just thought of. The smirk vanished. “The world is rarely that simple.” she said instead, her voice neutral.

“It is here,” Mr. Stark said firmly. “You look out for us and we’ll look out for you. That’s how this works.” He paused for a second and added, “That doesn’t mean we’re always going to get along. I don’t get your whole, uh. Thing. And I’m kind of an asshole. An endearing one, I like to think. But, uh, I’m probably gonna say some dumb shit, but I’m not—just because I’m a genius doesn’t mean I always think before I open my mouth. I really appreciate that you’re helping us with this, and…” He pursed his lips. “After all this, you can stick around, if you want. You’d have earned it.”

Peter glanced between the two of them a little nervously, still holding onto Loki’s hair. This could go… really good, or really bad.

Loki chewed at her lip. “Thank you.” She looked like she wasn’t sure if she meant that sincerely or begrudgingly. “I know that can’t be an easy offer to extend, considering both the circumstances of our first meeting—” her expression shifted “—and your… inborn character.”

Mr. Stark breathed a laugh. “You are _such_ a bitch, honestly. I don’t know what Peter sees in you.”

Her responding smirk was a little pained. “Oh, you know,” she said airily. “Class… beauty…” She retched, throwing up more of—was that her stomach lining? _Ow_. She had a brief coughing fit before finishing, “Elegance.”

⁂

Things weren’t exactly… hunky-dory after that, but Mr. Stark and Loki were getting along a lot better than they were. Sort of. Loki still threatened grievous bodily harm in loving, intricate detail (really, _really_ creepily loving detail) whenever Mr. Stark did anything she didn’t like, and Mr. Stark still called Loki a lot of names and said some _really mean stuff_ sometimes. Which, okay, was sometimes pointing out when Loki was dismissing what she called ‘lesser lifeforms’ and meant ‘anyone who wasn’t Asgardian’, and that was totally legit, but Peter wasn’t sure how constructive it was to respond to that by cheerfully reminding her that, having been genocided, Asgardians were no longer _any_ form of life, let alone the greatest.

(It occurred to him that he might actually have the best conflict management skills of their entire party, and it was a little bit depressing.)

But Loki didn’t totally shut down when Mr. Stark entered the room anymore, and Mr. Stark not only stopped looking at her like she was about to slit Peter’s throat at any second, but also stopped warning Peter that he couldn’t trust her and she might slit his throat at any second. They even had entire (short) conversations that didn’t have any insults at all!

More often, though, they’d started being _companionably mean_ , like when Mr. Stark told Loki her hair looked pretty when she let it dry in its natural curls, by which he meant that Mr. Stark walked in the room and told her that he was really liking how she didn’t look like the greasy lovechild of Severus Snape and Nancy Drew anymore.

“I’m unfamiliar with those names,” Loki had said, with an unspoken ‘as you well know’, “but I assure you I was more bothered by the situation than you were. Unfortunately, the Chitauri hardly had any use for shampoo, and Thanos counted it an unnecessary luxury.”

“Well then we’ve _definitely_ gotta stop him,” Mr. Stark had replied. “That’s just evil,” and it was clearly making fun of her but she also didn’t seem to mind. Peter didn’t really _get_ what made joke-meanness different from regular meanness, but they’d shared a little smile and laugh, and that was…

Well, mostly it was really disconcerting. But it was _really good news_ , too! And hopefully it would stop feeling so weird after a while.

And they were also finding other people who wanted to help! In exchange for promises of money, a lot of the time, but also sometimes not. Thanos had a reputation around here already, it seemed like, and a lot of people wanted to stop him. Or kill him. A _lot_ of people very specifically wanted him dead, and Peter tried not to think about that too much as they sent people through Loki’s Tesseract portals to Earth.

“This is a war, kid,” Mr. Stark told him in their third motel in as many planets one night when he mentioned his discomfort with it. He didn’t seem super happy about it either, which wasn’t much consolation.

“I just… Isn’t there some way to stop him without killing anyone?” Hadn’t anyone even _looked_? Peter ran a hand through his hair and paced the room. Loki scoffed quietly from the bed, where she was (as usual) _reclining_ , like she was on a chaise lounge in a castle in 18th century France and not a bed in a motel you could rent by the hour. “I’m serious! We have the Space Stone, and the Avengers on Earth have the Mind Stone and the Time Stone, and we have a whole _bunch_ of super powerful people fighting him. He only has five people on _his_ side! Less, if we can talk to them!”

“Talk to them?” Loki said.

“I mean. _You’re_ on our side now.”

“I was never on Thanos’ side to begin with. He merely offered me the best of several unappealing options in return for my cooperation.”

“Exactly! How many other people in the Black Order are in the exact same position? If nobody ever gives them a _way_ to leave, how can they?”

She shook her head. “They won’t leave. Trust me.” There was something final in her voice. Something rock solid sure. She turned to look at Mr. Stark, who was sitting at the desk crossing off names on their growing list of potential allies. It was several pages long now, with notes about people’s last known locations, friends, previous accomplishments, et cetera, written in tiny, cramped all-caps next to their names. One line through a name meant they were part of the cause and had headed to Earth. A scribble over a name meant they’d said to fuck off, or asked for some really unreasonable sum of money and _then_ , after being told they didn’t have that, said to fuck off. “Where to next?”

Mr. Stark frowned. “We’re pretty short on cash,” he said. “We _could_ just head back to Earth now.”

Loki frowned. “We can return to Knowhere if we need additional funds.”

“I’m not sure how much good that’ll do us,” Mr. Stark said. “We’ve got a lot of people on our side—more than I was expecting, to be totally honest—and we’ve got to remember that this is pretty time sensitive, too. We might do the most good heading home to join the fight—even if _some of us_ are committed to nonlethal options. I’m assuming you’re still fine with punching him?” he directed to Peter.

“Yeah,” said Peter shortly.

“Yeah, so,” Mr. Stark continued. “Like he said, we practically have an army on our side, and three of six Infinity Stones, and Thanos can’t get those unless you just hand them over to him. Which you won’t do, obviously. So we’re on a level playing field, as long as we’re all participating.”

For a second, Loki looked _trapped_ , before that was tucked away behind a shuttered, blank expression. “That’s all well and good,” she said, “but I refuse.”

Mr. Stark opened his mouth to respond, but Loki had swung herself off the bed and stalked out the door.

“Fuck,” said Mr. Stark succinctly.

⁂

Peter followed her outside. It was _hideously_ cold on this planet at night, and even though his suit was designed to insulate him from extreme temperatures, Peter’s teeth were already chattering by the time he’d figured out where she’d disappeared to.

He stopped at the bottom of the weird plastic wall she’d ended up perched on, staring broodily out into the night. “Mind if I join you?” he shouted up at her. She didn’t respond. Which wasn’t a ‘no’, so Peter jumped lightly up onto the wall beside her. Wow, the wind was even worse up here. Loki didn’t even look chilly.

He swung his legs off the edge of the wall idly, securing himself onto the wall with spread fingers. He wasn’t super sure how Loki, without super spider climbing powers or even a hand-hold on the wall, felt secure up here. “I know you’re scared,” he told her. She didn’t even glance at him. He pressed on. “I get the feeling there’s a lot of stuff Thanos did to you you haven’t told anybody. Which is fine! You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. But, um. You’re not alone anymore, you know? It’s not just you trying to stand up against him. I think we have a really good shot at stopping Thanos. Like, maybe a better shot than anyone has had before. And we’d have even more of a chance if you helped. You’re _really_ strong.” He paused. He was sure there was something else he could add to that.

“You’ve never even _met_ Thanos,” Loki said, finally. “You have no idea if the people we’ve gathered even have a chance.”

“Uh,” Peter said. “ _Do_ they? You said they were worth sending.”

Loki tilted her head thoughtfully. “Maybe. Against the Leviathans, yes. Against the Black Order, possibly. Thanos himself?” She shook her head. “No one can kill Thanos. He’s in a class beyond any of the mortals that inhabit this universe.”

“I mean. He’s a person, right? You’re talking about him like he’s a god or something.”

“To humans, _we’re_ gods. But I was _nothing_ compared to Thanos. And he had only one Infinity Stone when I knew him. By now he must have at least three. Think about it. You could barely fight _me_ off, and I was hardly trying. Imagine how much worse he will be.”

Peter thought about this. It was hard to imagine, he admitted. He didn’t really have any frame of reference, and he was only, like, eight when Loki brought her alien army to New York. But he couldn’t believe it was as hopeless as Loki was making it out to be. "If he was as strong as that, why'd he have to send you to invade Earth?"

Loki laughed. “I was sent to retrieve an artifact and test the reaction of your government to a perceived threat. A real invasion would come later. The orders changed when your Avengers brought down a Leviathan. I was never told why. Thanos doesn’t encourage questions.”

Peter remembered the fight he’d had with Mr. Stark earlier that week. “Did you want to? Invade Earth, I mean?”

Loki threw him an unreadable glance, and then turned away to face the city again. She didn’t reply.

“I get it,” Peter said. “It’s probably complicated.”

Loki scoffed. “You _don’t_ get it. And you won’t gain my assistance by pretending you do. I don’t owe you anything, and I’m not going to get myself killed for your miserable little planet.”

“I don’t want you to _owe_ me,” Peter said. “And I don’t want you to help us because you feel like you’re obligated.” Though he had a feeling Mr. Stark would be fine with that plan, if it helped save Earth. “But I know you want to stop Thanos just as much as we do. Even more, maybe! And you don’t have to be doing it for the same reasons as us. We’ll be there anyway. We’ll all be fighting him together. You won’t be alone!”

“I appreciate your fervor,” Loki said after a long silence. “I wish the fighters on Earth all the best, and… _perhaps_ , with luck, they will succeed. But they will have to do so without us. I am not ready to face Thanos and die for their half a chance. Nor should you be.”

⁂

Because Loki was their only way back to Earth that took less than _six years_ , according to the trip planner Peter had found online (on the spacenet?) for interstellar passenger voyages, they were a little bit stuck until either Thanos died and somebody thought to send word back or Peter managed to think of an argument that would convince Loki to go to the planet her worst fear was on.

Loki had repeated her offer to get more stuff to pawn in the burnt-out husk of the Collection, but Mr. Stark insisted that she’d take them to Earth or she’d take them _nowhere_ , without the K. That morning he’d announced that they were going to _earn_ some extra cash, the good old-fashioned way. Which was how they’d ended up at a casino.

Peter’d never been to a casino before, and this one wasn’t quite what he’d seen of them in movies. The door had been guarded by someone who looked an awful lot like a yeti, but who’d barely even glanced at them before grunting a barely intelligible “Yeah,” and waving them through. He guessed he and Loki looked like adults to a yeti, because when they got their first look at what was inside it was not somewhere kids should probably be allowed to go. On the bright side, Mr. Stark didn’t stand out _quite_ as much as he could have in his Iron Man suit; there were at least a half dozen robot-looking patrons just in Peter’s view.

In front of them was a huge, sprawling room exploding with color and people. Intricately decorated half-walls marked a few sectioned off areas along the wall, with holographs lining the top of them advertising ‘Cards’ or ‘Roulette’. Peter wasn’t familiar enough with the regular human varieties to tell if they were actually the same things or just the closest English-language approximation. In between the sections were low, circular stages that mostly had people dancing in various stages of undress, in _very_ flashy clothing. A couple of scaled bipedal people seemed to wear nothing but what looked like iridescent tattoos, as they moved in a hypnotic rhythm just to Peter’s left. The stage just past that one was surrounded by a cage, and the person inside honestly just looked like a writhing mass of tentacles climbing up and around the cage with slow, deliberate movements. Delicate bands of silver and gold dotted their many, many limbs.

Mr. Stark whistled behind him. “Is that… a tentacle monster doing a cage dance?”

Loki gave him an odd look. “Obviously. And a very pretty one, If I’m not mistaken.”

“Wow,” Peter said. “What species is she?”

“I can’t actually pronounce the name,” Loki admitted. “Not enough tongues. Most people call things like them starfish.” She shrugged.

Mr. Stark had turned his head to keep watching her as they walked past. “Well, shit.”

“If you’re going to keep staring, you should at least tip her.”

Mr. Stark finally pulled his eyes away to stare at Loki. “Didn’t know you cared so much,” he muttered. “Do you even know what tipping is?”

“Of course.” Loki sniffed, and kept walking.

“...Well? What is it, then?”

“I don’t need to explain _every_ little thing to you.” She gestured at a passing woman carrying a tray of fancy glass cups (and wearing a _very_ sheer tank top) and plucked one off the tray. Without even glancing at the contents (three layers of very bright colors) she tipped the glass back and swallowed a third of it.

“ _Hey_ ,” Mr. Stark said. “Are you even old enough to be drinking?”

Loki stared at him and took another long sip of the drink. The woman with the tray hadn’t left. She lifted the tray out slightly to Peter and gave him a questioning look. The cups on it were gorgeous. Each a different collection of colors, in cups of all shapes and sizes. Peter grabbed a tall, skinny glass filled with a sort of bright orange liquid pooling to red at the bottom.

“Thanks!” he said to the waitress.

“Oh, for the love of— you are _definitely_ not old enough.” Mr. Stark grabbed the glass out of Peter’s hand, and while he sniffed at it suspiciously, Loki handed Peter her own glass. It was mostly empty now, with some thick, blueish liquid remaining at the bottom. She gestured at him to drink it before Mr. Stark could pull it away too. Her face was resolutely even, but there was an impish spark in her eyes.

Well, she’d managed okay. He downed it.

It was a little bit like swallowing a bundle of sandpaper. Or fire? Peter almost dropped the glass, immediately starting to choke.

“Jesus.” The glass was taken out of his hand. “Breathe, kid.”

Peter took a long, shuddering breath. The coughs were starting to slow. He wiped at his eyes, because of course he’d started crying, oh god, and blinked his vision clear. Loki was standing right where she’d been before, grinning from ear to ear. Peter glared at her.

“You knew that was going to happen!” His voice came out kind of hoarse, which only made Loki grin wider. God, she _was_ evil.

Mr. Stark sighed, rubbing at his temple with a hand. “You’re going to kill me,” he said, almost to nobody, and then looked up and stared at Peter. “Your aunt doesn’t hear a _word_ of this, you understand?”

Peter coughed again. “No problem.” It was not exactly a story he was eager to spread.

Still, though. He’d just had hard liquor, he was pretty sure. That was cool.

Mr. Stark was starting to look a little bit like Happy by the time he herded them both into the card room. He found a table of people playing with the shiny pentagon shaped cards Loki had described when she’d briefed them on the one card game she knew the rules of. Sliding into an empty chair, he turned to Peter and Loki as his hand was dealt out.

“Here’s the plan. If you two can manage to avoid getting us all killed for about, oh, an hour or two, maybe, I can win us enough for the princess to live off of for a while. Then she sends us back to Earth, and we’ll let her know how the whole invasion thing turns out.”

Oh. That was a solution Peter hadn’t thought of.

Beside him, Loki practically _dripped_ disapproval. “I beg your pardon?”

“What, so now you _don’t_ want to stay here?”

“You’re planning to face Thanos with _him_?” She gestured at Peter, which he thought was kind of rude. What’d he ever do to get singled out? “Do you even realize what a terrible idea that is? Thanos is always looking for new blood, and a child who already possesses extraordinary powers is perfect. He wouldn’t need to be taught to fight; only brought to heel.”

“Wow, that is not an image I ever wanted to have.” Mr. Stark looked like he was about to say more, when the guy across from them, yellowish-green and covered in scars, spoke up.

“Oh, man, I recognize that angry voice.” He leaned forward enthusiastically over his hand of cards, smiling and only slurring a tiny bit as he spoke, and staring right at Loki. “I never expected to see you off-planet! You look _amazing_.”

Loki had stiffened as soon as the guy started talking, and carefully smoothed her face into something Peter was starting to mentally coin her poker face. “I’m afraid I can’t say the same for you,” she said, with her favorite not-really-that-subtle undercurrent of disdain.

The guy laughed, unfazed. “Charming as ever, doll. Just like old times. Y’know, I almost didn’t recognize you in all that getup.” Peter glanced at Loki in case she’d changed sometime in the three seconds since he’d looked at her last, but she was still in her usual fancy Asgardian not-armor. The guy held up a finger in slightly exaggerated thought, peering at her. “I never did catch your name back then. Unless it really _is_ Lo-Lo, but that’d be—ha!—a new one for the ol’ Grandmaster. He sure does love his nicknames.” The guy chuckled to himself, like that was a really good joke. Loki wasn’t laughing.

“Loki,” she said shortly.

“Loki! That’s a great name! Real pretty. Like you, right?” He stretched a hand out over the table toward her, palm-up, scattering the little chip spheres at his elbow as he did. “Nice to meet you _properly_ this time.”

Loki stared at the hand, but didn’t move forward to clasp it. Mr. Stark was staring between the two suspiciously. Peter cleared his throat. It sounded loud, somehow, in the crowded room.

“So, you two know each other!” he said, then kicked himself. Obviously they did. “Where’d you meet?” He had no idea what was going on.

Loki flexed her right hand slightly, like she wished she still had that glass.

“Sakaar! ‘Land of all lost and unloved things’,” he added in an affected voice, like he was quoting some propaganda. “It’s kind of like hell, and kind of like a party that never ends. Great place to meet people.” He raised his hand of cards in a half-salute at Loki. “Glad you got out, though, seriously.” Loki’s stiff unresponsiveness seemed to finally get noticed, because he got a nervous look himself and said, “You _did_ , didn’t you? The Grandmaster isn’t, like, behind me, or something?”

Despite the fact the laws of narrative comedy suggested now that he’d said that, it ought to be true, nobody materialized behind him. Loki’s brow furrowed. “Why would he be anywhere but Sakaar?”

The guy laughed again, but it was nervous now. A little forced. “That a joke, doll? He left. Got the hell out when the prisoners-with-jobs revolt went down. Can’t say I blame him, haha.”

“Where did he go?” Somehow, Loki had wound even tighter. “A vacation home somewhere?”

“Hell if I know. He could be anywhere. Around any corner.” He glanced around him nervously. Loki was doing the same. Then she stood up abruptly.

“Thank you for the information,” she said. “But we must be going. Come along.” And then she started striding toward the exit, not even glancing behind her to see if he and Mr. Stark were following. Peter scrambled to catch up with her. Mr. Stark shot them a look and told the dealer, “Uh, I guess I’m cashing out,” collecting his small pile of chips.

“Loki?” Peter asked, half-jogging beside her.

“I’ve thought about what you said last night,” she told him. “And I find you made a very compelling argument. I will be coming with you to Earth, so there is no need to collect more money tonight.”

⁂

And that was apparently that. One weird conversation with some guy she knew from ‘old times’ and Loki was ready to go kill Thanos. Who even _was_ this ‘Grandmaster’? Was _he_ going to try and invade the universe next? Because Peter didn’t think he could take a second go of this.

Loki wasn’t talking, though, even when Mr. Stark was asking her very pointed questions about Sakaar, and who the guy in the casino was, and why she’d been going by ‘Lo-Lo’. Eventually, Loki locked herself in the bathroom, telling them they would leave as soon as she was finished ‘preparing’, which Peter thought was a funny way for the Allspeak to translate ‘having a panic attack’.

Mr. Stark didn’t look much calmer. He’d positioned himself by the door, and was doing a breathing exercise, like therapists tell you to do. After Uncle Ben had been killed and Peter’d had trouble with anxiety, he’d gotten taught to do it, too. 4-7-8. Funny, he’d never thought of Mr. Stark as someone who’d also have those problems.

Peter sat at the table, because there didn’t seem to be much else for him to do. He’d never been super great at not having anything to do. He fiddled with his fingers, and thought about how this was probably the last time he’d sit at this table, on this planet. Maybe the last time he’d see the planet, ever. It was weird.

Eventually, Loki came back out of the bathroom, looking… determined, but hopeless. Peter bit his lip and wondered if he should say anything. But what? He wasn’t exactly sure they wouldn’t die, either, despite what he’d said to Loki the other night.

In the end, Loki didn’t wait for him to say anything. She walked to an empty space in the room by the bed and pulled the Tesseract out of her magical pocket dimension—kind of like a Bag of Holding without the bag. “I’ll link the portal to the location of the Infinity Stones on Earth,” she told them. “Likely that’s where any battle will be. Prepare yourselves. We could be walking into a slaughter.”

Peter shivered. Through the shimmery, stargate film of the portal he could hear gunfire, and shouting.

They stepped through, and the first thing Peter noticed was that he’d stepped on something wet and, when he looked down, red. There were bodies strewn everywhere: some human, some alien. A lot of the people, he didn’t recognize, but some he did. And it was quiet. Eerily quiet; not like there wasn’t actually any noise—there were still some people fighting these weird quadrupedal aliens, and others hunched over their dead or dying comrades—but like it was all weirdly hushed, unreal. For a second, Peter was afraid they’d walked in at the end of the battle, and Earth had lost. _If we’d come sooner_ _—_

Loki made an unsteady sort of whining sound, something he wasn’t even sure if humans could make. She was staring, rapt, at a scene only a few yards away: a huge, hulking figure with mottled purple skin, collapsed on the battlefield, dwarfing the bodies around it. Standing above it was another, much smaller figure with intricate metal protruding from blue and purple patchwork skin, covered in blood and _heaving_. There was a gun in one of her hands, limp at her side, and it was big enough that if she wasn’t standing on the giant’s corpse it would be supported by the ground. She didn’t seem to mind how heavy it must have been, or even notice. She just looked down at the body with a weird expression. Satisfied, but mournful, too. Like whatever had happened here hadn’t changed as much as she hoped it would.

She swung her giant gun back up and shot the giant in the face, again and again and again. When the smoke cleared, he didn’t have one. The alien woman standing on his chest seemed more content.

“He’s dead,” Loki whispered hoarsely. “Thanos is dead.”

It was… it was over. Mr. Stark caught the attention of some of the people who hadn’t fallen; Peter was halfway aware of Captain America jogging towards them, shield nowhere in sight, and covered in blood and soot. He…

He should have felt relieved, shouldn’t he? He _did_ feel relieved. Thanos had been stopped. The universe was safe. But at the same time, it felt like all of the bravery had just drained out of him. There were bodies everywhere, and flies. People were dead; _lots_ of people, most of them torn to shreds. Antman—Peter had met him before, during that whole thing headlines called the ‘superhero civil war’—, his body, clearly recognizable at what must have been about thirty feet tall, was slumped in the treeline. Impaled. He had a daughter, didn’t he?

Loki was on the ground, an alien soldier’s body at her back. “He’s dead,” she kept whispering to herself. Her breath was fast and shallow, and her face was waxy. “He’s dead. He’s dead.”

Peter felt like he was coming to pieces over the bodies of a couple near-strangers. Loki’s entire species, or what was left of it, had been killed in front of her. And on her face was an expression a lot like the cyborg woman’s: she was satisfied with Thanos’ death, or trying to be, but this hadn’t changed anything. He knelt beside her in the mud.

“We didn’t die,” he started with, because he wasn’t sure what else to say.

Loki laughed, shakily. “We didn’t,” she said. “Only everyone else.” A fly buzzed around her head before alighting on the still-open eye of the Kree soldier she was leaning against. Peter watched it rub its tiny little front legs all over the man’s iris. That was how they tasted, wasn’t it?

Peter let out a breath. “It only feels like everyone,” he told her, because he had to keep thinking of Aunt May and Ned and MJ, who were probably okay still, back in New York. This was the battlefield, but the cities were still standing. He hoped. All the soldiers attacking New York had left once they had Loki. Probably. They’d just wanted the Infinity Stones.

Loki was still on the ground, still pale. She wasn’t looking at him. “You can say that. You still have your planet.”

Peter… didn’t know what to say to that. He couldn’t even wrap his head around what that would be like. And he couldn’t exactly say, ‘well, sure, your whole world is gone, but the _rest_ of the Universe—!’. He couldn’t imagine that making _him_ feel any better.

Loki was bracing herself on the ground with both her hands. Peter put out one of his, palm up, beside hers. She took it, intertwining their fingers, and threw her head back, eyes closed. For a long time, Peter just watched her as she wept silently, and her breath slowly steadied out once she was finished. There was other stuff going on behind them, the older superheroes talking about what had happened here, who they’d lost, what they were going to do next, but that didn’t matter right now. He could find out later.

Right now he had a hand to hold. And, _wow_ , was he glad he had super-strength. Loki seemed to be doing her level best to break his fingers.

“Um,” he said. “I know it doesn’t bring anyone back. But if you’re interested… my Aunt May, she watches a lot of the Food Network when she can’t sleep, so, you know, she’s really good at plating takeout.” She probably didn’t know what most of that meant. “And, uh. I think she’d really like you. She—she says I have good instincts.”

Loki actually… giggled. A little; she didn’t have much breath available to do it with. “They can’t be that good,” she told him. “You like _me_.”

“They’re _fantastic_ ,” he told her solemnly. “I could win awards.”

There was a hint of a smile around her mouth. “That's _deeply_ arrogant. I shouldn't find it so charming. And yet here I am. Charmed.”

That was a _compliment_. A really roundabout one, but a compliment! She thought he was _charming!_ Loki looked up and caught his eye, her hair falling over her face slightly, casting shadow over her eyes. They were bright, like another batch of tears was balancing on the edge of them, deciding whether or not to fall. Peter thought she looked gorgeous. He really, really wanted to kiss her. Without really thinking about it, he leaned forward and did.

Loki froze, and her hand tightened painfully around his again. Oh, shit. What was he _doing_? Peter pulled back and saw Loki staring at him with wide, shocked eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “God, I shouldn’t have done that without asking. I’m so—” and then Loki closed the space between them and kissed him back.

Peter’d only really done this once before, and it had been pretty awkward on both sides. This time was different. Loki’s lips were cool ( _cold_ , even) and the chapped edges caught and dragged at his lips a little. They were gritty—lightly coated with the dust kicked up around the battlefield. Loki brought one hand up to cup his head and gently reposition him, like she knew exactly what she was doing; she caught her fingers in his hair and tugged lightly. He could feel her breath, cool on his skin, and then her tongue, pressing insistently at his lips. He felt his chest flutter as he parted them, like anxiety he didn’t want to get rid of, and he was really glad she seemed to know what she was doing because he had no idea. Could she tell how clueless he was? Was she regretting this? Loki’s _tongue_ was cold, too, as it met his—which made sense, he figured; he’d seen what she looked like on thermal imaging, practically indistinguishable from the air—and it didn’t feel _bad_ , not at all, but it was… strange. He focused on not accidentally biting it, and let her take control.

He couldn’t say how long it went on. Maybe hours. Maybe just seconds. It was—it sounded ridiculous and romantic and kind of fake, but it was like the world fell away, and _they_ did, too, and all there was was their connection, and he wasn’t anywhere at all but the nowhere was bigger than it should have been and filled with a tension he’d never felt before. Wasn’t really feeling now, either. Just aware of it.

Eventually, Loki started to pull away, catching his lower lip on her teeth as she did. It burned, but in a nice way. She sat back, watching him expectantly.

Peter opened and closed his mouth several times. “Wow,” he said, finally. Loki raised an eyebrow, and he hurriedly added, “That was amazing.”

The smile that had been threatening to appear on her face did now, shifting to something a little bit smug. “I’ve been told _I_ could win awards at _that._ ”

“I believe that,” he said, completely sincerely.

They stared at each other for maybe a little bit too long after that, hands still clasped, faces close together. Peter was pretty sure he should say something else, like maybe, “Does this mean we’re dating?” or “Why’d you kiss back?”, but he couldn’t figure out where to start. And he didn’t really want to move away just yet.

Eventually, Loki licked her lips and started to look around, face closing down in a way that was by now pretty familiar. Peter followed her gaze to find Mr. Stark and Captain America standing a few feet away, just kind of… watching them. Right. That wasn’t awkward or anything. It was a good thing he was too giddy to care.

“Hi,” Peter said. “Is the fight over?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Everybody knows the most romantic place for a first kiss is surrounded by corpses. Obviously.)
> 
> The detail about orders changing in _Avengers (2012)_ when the first Leviathan was brought down is from [a deleted scene](https://youtu.be/9m3NpkeTOmk).


	4. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “If I could have your attention,” the doctor said. “You will be pleased to know that the quarantine area now has high speed WiFi connectivity! Thank you all for your patience in this matter.”

Peter had thought going home after that would be weird, but it turned out ‘going home’ wasn’t happening until he’d spent an alarmingly nonspecific _n_ weeks in quarantine—however long it took to convince a bunch of doctors that they weren’t going to have saved the world from an alien genocide only to turn around and kill everybody with some alien super-plague. It’d been cool the first couple of days. The Wakandans had set up this huge tent next to the battlefield, and scanned everyone with what looked like actual scanners, like from Star Trek! Well, not _exactly_ like the ones from Star Trek, obviously, but they beeped and apparently conveyed useful information so they were basically the same thing.

Everyone who’d had contact with aliens (including the aliens) had to either go inside or leave, so everybody the three of them had recruited ditched just about as soon as it was obvious Thanos was dead and his daughter Nebula, who’d killed him, didn’t plan on finishing up where he’d left off. Peter had kind of hoped the Guardians of the Galaxy, whose team leader turned out to be from Earth too, would stick around, at least, but the human—a guy called Starlord—said that quarantine “cramped his style” and that he’d sneak his team back to sight-see some other time. None of the doctors seemed super amused.

And that just left Peter, and Loki, and the Avengers, and a bunch of Wakandans who’d been on the battlefield, including the _king_ , who was super nice, and had told Peter he’d done a great service for Earth today and that he was proud of him. Peter kind of wanted to ask for an autograph, honestly, but he wasn’t sure if kings did that.

Now Peter was in the one of the identical standard issue scrubs they’d made everyone change into, sitting on one of the fold-up plastic tables, which he kind of thought would be more high tech in Wakanda but just opened from a weird angle instead. Maybe they’d kept all their high tech tables at home? He figured it was probably easier to sterilize a piece of plastic than something with circuit boards in it. Disappointing, though. Someone had set up a dart board against the wall nearest to him, by taking a pinboard and drawing five wobbly circles over it. One of them was only half-drawn, because there had been an argument partway through about how many rings should go on a dartboard, and whether the current ones had been drawn too wide. The center ring had had glitter added to it, to differentiate it from the others. Peter wasn’t the one who’d supplied the glitter.

Loki was perched on the other side of the same table, also in scrubs, which she looked _very_ cute in, although Peter admitted privately that he was probably biased. She was trying very hard to maintain an air of bored disdain over the dart game, but Peter had seen her fingers twitching ever-so-slightly where they were pressed to the table at her waist, at every other dart thrown. The darts, of course, were empty syringes from a box someone had swiped from the examination area, and knives. Knives were worth double points, but only if they didn’t knock off a syringe.

Black Widow threw an anodized knife at the dartboard. Loki’s fingers twitched. A syringe maybe… half a millimeter away from where the knife landed in dead-center shuddered, and slipped to the floor. Sam Wilson crowed victorious.

“You’re a monster,” Peter told Loki solemnly. Loki tipped her head back and gave him a conspiratorial grin wide enough he could see the huge and _scary_ -sharp teeth she had behind her canines—he felt kind of vindicated, because he’d totally called that she had weird teeth, but had to wait until she actually showed them, because you can’t just _ask_ someone if you can see their teeth. Not twice, anyway. Probably.

Anyway, she was having fun, which made one of them. Peter kicked his feet restlessly in the air and glanced over at the medics looking over clipboards in the shadows like suspicious people. Then he glanced over at Mr. Stark and Thor with their heads together in another corner. They’d been mostly talking about what to do about The Loki Problem—said with audible capital letters snapping into place, when anybody brought it up—the past two days. Peter didn’t like it. They were talking about putting her back into those EMP cuffs, as if she hadn’t just helped save the entire world. At least Mr. Stark had so far disagreed. Begrudgingly, but he had, which meant if the others wanted to get cuffs they’d have to get them from the Wakandans.

And they were all stuck in a tent together with the Wakandan king for the next several weeks.

Maybe Loki could win him over.

Peter glanced over at Loki, who was watching Black Widow stalk away from the dartboard and looking _very_ pleased with herself, and sighed. Could happen.

They were interrupted by a loud, deep buzz coming from the front of the tent. One of the doctors running the quarantine was standing there holding a cylinder with blinking lights that Peter could only assume was a buzzer. “If I could have your attention,” the doctor said. “You will be pleased to know that the quarantine area now has high speed WiFi connectivity! Thank you all for your patience in this matter.”

_Sweet._

⁂

"—Yeah, nope! Not even a cough! The doctors are interested in the whole radioactive spiderbite thing, too, so—"

“They’re not going to take you away for study, are they?” Aunt May asked worriedly. “Did they check for radiation? You should find out if there was any left over.”

“I’m pretty sure I’d have noticed radiation poisoning by now, Aunt May.”

The nurse glanced up from where she was noting things down in his file and said, “You would have.”

“See? Doc agrees. Say hi!” He turned his phone so that he and the nurse were both in the picture and gave a thumbs up at Aunt May. “Anyway, they asked if they could sequence my DNA or something, and they seem really nice and Captain America likes them, so I figure it’s fine. Shuri promised to tell me if they make anything cool out of it.”

He’d called Aunt May first, obviously, and the worry had just been kind of been there from the moment she’d picked up. Or before. He _had_ mysteriously gone missing from the middle of an alien invasion a week ago. So he did his best to reassure her. He explained that he’d just ended up on one of the invasion ships, and had been travelling the universe the whole time, far away from the battlefield. For some reason that didn’t seem to help, so he reminded her he’d been with Mr. Stark the whole time, which also didn’t seem to work as well as he thought it should, given Mr. Stark was a superhero.

“The important thing is,” he told her, “that I’m fine, and not even injured. I’m surrounded by doctors, even, who are checking for space plague. And after this I’m gonna show Loki how to play tic-tac-toe.

“ _Loki?_ ”

Right. That.

“Yeah!” he told her. “She was helping us fight Thanos. She’s cool.” He went to hop off the exam table and was stopped by the nurse literally throwing her arm in front of his chest. “Loki! Loki, say hi!” He raised his voice and waved wildly toward where Loki was leaning against a wall waiting for the nurse to finish draining what felt like at _least_ a third of Peter’s blood into color-coded vials, then turned his phone around so she was in the picture. She frowned over at him and didn’t move. Behind her, Thor half-turned at his voice and gave a cheery wave at the camera. Loki looked at Thor and mouthed ‘really?’

“Is that _Thor?_ ” Aunt May asked, a little awed.

“Uh,” Peter said. “Yeah.” Privately he hoped Aunt May wasn’t going to ask him to go over and introduce him. He turned the phone back around and tilted it away from his face so he could give Loki a disappointed look, which she rolled her eyes at. Spoilsport. The nurse finally capped the last vial of blood and took out the needle, then carefully covered the tiny red mark with a Captain America bandage. She smirked at him and then shooed him off the bench.

Just then, his phone dinged.

“One sec, Aunt May.” He swiped out of the video call screen to his texts. It was Ned. Underneath Peter’s earlier _hi!!!!! i’m alive! in quarantine from the alien invasion battle. how r u?_ , Ned had written, _PROOF OF LIFE_

Another text popped up as Peter was pulling up the keyboard. _HOW DO I KNOW A CHESTBURSTER DIDNT TYPE THIS_

“Uh,” said Peter. He swiped back to the video call. “I gotta take this, Aunt May. Call you back in a couple?”

She made a noise in assent, still sounding a little stunned. “Love you,” Peter said. “Back soon.” He switched back to his texts. _no thumbs?_ he typed. He took a quick selfie and sent it to Ned.

_convincing. but that could be from anything. i want today’s newspaper in the shot._

Peter glanced around as he made his way over to Loki. “Do they have newspapers here?” he asked her. She shrugged. He typed, _i can try to find one but it’ll be in wakandan._

_dude!! your in wakanda????_

_technically we're just near wakanda_ , he said, and paused. Then: _i’m in a tent with literally all of the avengers, even captain america_

 _OMFG_. Then: _ask cap what he thinks about how the sokovia accords affected our ability to handle the recent alien invasions._

 _hi mj_ , Peter typed.

 _sorry dude she legit tore the phone out of my hands,_ came the next text, followed by _she says yr lunch moneys toast if u dont get her a quote_

Peter smiled. He typed, _i’ll see what i can do. is there anything else u need?_

The reply was almost instant: _pics, duh_

Peter obligingly turned a circle, taking pictures of the whole tent and sending them to Ned and MJ. His last one was of Loki, still leaning against the wall beside him and refusing to smile for the camera. He added little cartoon stars around her head and showed it to her just as he hit send, dancing away as she tried to grab the phone before he could.

 _dude_ , came Ned’s next text. _that’s awesome. WAIT IS THAT LOKI_

“Too late,” he told Loki. “You’re a star now.” He texted back, _yeah that’s loki she’s really cool we saved the world together, and she’s our age and trans and she’s gonna be on our side now if the avengers will let her, and she REFUSES to smile in any of the pictures i’ve taken since we’ve been here it’s awful. also, we made out._

 _OH MY GOD_ , came Ned’s next text, and was also his next three. _DID YOU ACTUALLY SEDUCE A SUPERVILLAIN SO HARD SHE WENT H E R O???? SPIDEY GOT GAME_

 _I mean,_  Peter typed back, very aware of Loki looking over his shoulder now as he did, _she reformed herself mostly_

“Is that what I did?” Loki asked wryly, her head bent over Peter’s shoulder and breath tickling his ear slightly. It wasn’t distracting. “‘Reformed’? Ah, yes,” and a weird note came into her voice, and she started enunciating even sharper than usual, “Loki skywalker, that last-remaining son of victorious gods, who fights valiantly, _tirelessly_ , for what is—” she snickered “—what is _good_ and _just…"_

Peter shh’d her, resolving to definitely bring up the misgendering thing later. And maybe show her _Star Wars_.

 _still,_ Ned said, _u kissed a reformed supervillain. I’m so proud of u man. ur LIVING the dream_

Peter… didn’t disagree. He may have had a few (dozen) daydreams about almost this exact thing when he first realized he was an actual honest-to-god superhero. Not that he’d tell _Loki_ that.

Another text: _meanwhile, MJ._

Oh, no. There was a period and everything. _how bad?_

 _theres a lot going on but shes said the word genocide 6 times now._ An update: _7\. uh. and she wants to talk to loki_

That sounded like a really, really terrible idea, which was confirmed by the sound it shocked out of Loki—a scoff with an audible smile at the end of it—and the fact she was already reaching for the phone.

Peter pulled it away, clutching it protectively against his torso. Loki, apparently realizing that the arm she’d reached over his shoulder to grab it wouldn’t be able to reach, instead reeled him in with it, her hand splayed across his chest. She had him pinned against her, so he couldn’t escape.

Oh. She was pressed really, _really_ close, the not-quite-warm sensation he could feel through the thin scrubs calling up memories of being hugged when he had a fever. He could feel her breath at his ear, and her hair fell into his peripheral vision as she tried to look over him to see his hands. Her other hand—the one that wasn’t pinning him to her chest—snaked up around his waist and scrabbled with him, trying to pry his fingers off the phone.

She could _try_. Mr. Stark had stopped trying to measure Peter’s grip strength a long time ago. He broke every sensor they had. He scaled _walls_ with his fingertips; keeping his grip on a phone was _nothing_.

Loki let out a mildly frustrated noise, and then paused, for a second even loosening her vise-like hold. Then Peter felt the light nip of teeth on his ear at the same time her hold tightened again, and suddenly he found it very hard to think about anything at all.

There was a warmth growing in the pit of his stomach.

Then, suddenly, his fingers had been pried off of his phone and both it and Loki were gone. It took a second to process the sudden loss of sensation, and then he turned to find Loki grinning at him, triumphant and smug, holding up the pilfered phone like a medal. He tried to grab for it, expecting her to use their height difference against him and go high, but instead she just twisted her hand and the phone disappeared altogether.

“Oh, _come on_ ,” Peter said, surprised by his own breathlessness. If his web shooters hadn’t been confiscated—along with the rest of his and everybody else’s costumes, weapons, and anything else that could potentially carry alien germs—he totally would have been able to grab it before she’d hidden it away in her pocket dimension.

But Loki wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. She was looking around the quarantine tent anxiously, her face pale and back stiff. Then she let out a breath. Peter followed her gaze to Thor, deep in conversation with Captain America, thirty feet away and with his back turned. Right. That could have been… really bad, potentially. Loki hadn’t said _what_ she thought Thor might do, if he knew about them—whatever ‘them’ was, and she hadn’t specified _that_ either, to his chagrin—but she was clearly really scared of it, and Peter didn’t know anywhere near enough about Thor to guess at whether her anxiety was just that, or if it was a justified fear.

“Hey,” Peter said softly. Loki jerked back to look at him, eyes still wide. “It’s okay. Nobody noticed.” He reached out a hand and she caught his fingers, the pad of her thumb brushing over his fingertips for a heartbeat before she let her hand fall again. “I, uh, _am_ gonna need my phone back in this dimension eventually, though.”

The reminder that she had his phone, and, by extension, had already ruined someone’s day simply by existing and had an open invitation to make it worse seemed to pull her out of her sombre mood. The phone had locked while in the pocket dimension, but the notification bar was lit up when she summoned it back, the last text showing the words _DON’T IGNORE ME, PARKER_ across the screen. Loki poked at the text and the phone obligingly brought up the login screen. Hah.

“It’s not gonna open for you,” he told her smugly. After all that, he’d _still_ managed to win.

Loki glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. Then something _shifted_ , like the universe had a glitch for half an instant, and Peter found himself staring at… himself. His own face, just slightly _wrong_ not because she hadn’t gotten his likeness right but because he was used to seeing himself in a mirror. The Not-Peter standing where Loki should have been poked at the screen again.

Peter gaped. “It opens with my _fingerprint,_ ” he clarified, relatively sure she couldn’t copy those. Did his hair really look like that? He patted it down self-consciously. “Listen, I’ll introduce you to my friends later, when everyone’s calmer, and _please_ don’t try to make them hate you? For me?”

The Not-Peter who was Loki stared at him, and then gave an aggrieved sigh and rolled her eyes dramatically. She tossed the phone back to Peter, who caught it straight out of the air because super-reflexes, yeah, he was pretty cool. He checked to see if Loki was impressed. She wasn’t.

He quickly unlocked his screen and scanned through the increasingly indignant texts, wincing a little. How did one get MJ to like a (former!) supervillain? Loki was inching close again, peering over his hands to read the texts, and Peter thought fast.

 _sorry mj,_ he typed, _king t’challa says he wants to talk to us about that whole world saving stuff we did so we gotta go ttyl!_

Then he resolutely muted his phone and stuck it in his pocket. Crisis averted! For… at least an hour, probably.

Loki bounced a bit on the balls of her feet at that, looking restless. She glanced back over at Thor, and then glanced over at the curtained area of the tent that had been set up to allow the quarantinees some privacy. She gave the curtained area a very intentional glance. “So,” she said, in a low, unmistakably flirtatious voice, “tell me more about how you _seduced_ me to the side of good.” She managed to make his own voice sound _way_ hotter than he could probably literally ever do; demoralizing _and_ sexy!

Peter shivered, that warmth now twisting in his stomach. Although. “Please change back first.”

⁂

Peter hesitated as he approached the table Loki had claimed as hers. She hadn’t ever _said_ as much, but she wasn’t very personable at the best of times, and right now she was sitting in silence, glowering down at the little Wakandan gaming console Shuri had extended to her as a metaphorical olive branch the week before (a mixed success). Wisely, everyone seemed to have made the decision to sit… literally anywhere else.

Peter Parker was many things. Wise was not one of them. And sure, maybe this was a bad time, but it seemed like _every_ time right now was a bad time. Her mood had progressively soured over the last week as the Avengers came closer and closer to agreeing on a solution to the problem that was… her. She hadn’t gotten any happier when they finally did.

He plopped down on the seat across from her. She didn’t look up from her console. Peter twiddled his fingers a bit, then blurted, “So my Aunt May has a guest room.”

Loki made a disinterested sound, still staring down at the console. She wasn’t even pressing any buttons. Was it a movie? If it was, it was a silent film.

“You know, she likes you,” he continued, determined. She _did._ Despite several really unsubtle attempts on Loki’s part to prevent it. Their conversations weren’t even really that awkward anymore. “She’d totally let you come live at our place. I bet Mr. Stark would even cover for us—especially once you’re out of Avengers HQ.”

Loki did look up at that. “I can handle living with Thor,” she told him shortly. “It isn't an issue.”

It was, though. Loki still got tense and worried whenever she and Peter were so much as standing close to each other in Thor’s line of sight, and Peter hadn’t overheard much of the few conversations they’d had together while in the tent, but they didn’t look… particularly happy. Honestly, Peter wasn’t even sure why Thor had _agreed_ to “take responsibility” for Loki while she was on Earth. Maybe it was a favor to Mr. Stark.

“Literally the entire tent can see how unhappy you are.” Thor had taken to looking rather like a kicked puppy the last couple of hours, though Peter had limited sympathy. He hadn’t said _anything_ positive to Loki’s credit when he’d had the chance, and now he was sad she wasn’t, what? Running gratefully to his arms?

“I’m always unhappy,” Loki told him. She started to spread her hands as if she was going to make one of her dramatic statements about what an inevitably terrible person she was, then she paused and sighed. Her hands dropped back down to the console. “The stipulations would be the same even if I was at your aunt's house.” Right, that whole thing where if she did anything illegal or ‘potentially dangerous’ she was back in the EMP cuffs or possibly shipped off to that nice supervillain cell in the middle of the ocean. Whatever ‘potentially dangerous’ behavior was, they’d left it undefined— _probably_ so they could decide what it was after the fact. “The end result is the same either way.”

Peter frowned. “Okay but, like. Ignoring how those rules suck, don’t you think it’d be easier to follow them if you were living with people who _didn’t_ hate you?”

Loki glanced over at Thor, frowning. “He doesn’t hate me,” she said, like she was trying to convince herself as much as Peter.

“He literally doesn’t respect anything about you.” He was _still_ calling her his brother!

Loki actually glared at him, at that. “Thor is a paragon, and yet he has always been accommodating of my failures. Given me chances even the kindest judge would never allot, and yet more after I squandered those. After New York, he told me that he would kill me if I ever betrayed him again. And on Sakaar, shocking no one, I _did_.” A hand drifted up from her white-knuckled grip on the console to her neck, where her fingers brushed an odd scar the size and shape of a nickel. “He spared me, out of sentiment alone. Is that not care enough for you?”

“Uh,” Peter said. He didn’t like the sound of Thor 'sparing' her. At all. “Should I ask what he did _instead_ of killing a kid?”

Loki waved a hand dismissively. The same hand that had just been touching the scar on her neck. “Nothing I didn’t deserve.”

It wasn’t an answer he liked, but it was the answer he probably should have seen coming. He screwed his eyes shut to avoid seeing the next one. “Will you tell me if you need help?”

No response. He opened his eyes, ready for her to be rolling her eyes, or ready to walk away, but Loki was just _looking_ at him, her mouth half open. Finally, she asked, “What?”

Well, no time like the present, huh? “I really like you,” Peter said. “You’re _weird_ , and really difficult sometimes, but you’re also really cool, and you listen when I’m rambling on about stuff you probably don't really care about, and when you see something you like but you’re trying to pretend you don’t like it, your face does this _thing_ I can’t really explain but it’s really, really cute, and I know I shouldn’t like when you’re being sadistic but it’s also kind of hot, and I _also_ know you don’t deserve, like, basically anything that’s ever happened to you. And I want—” He paused, and faltered a bit, tried to find a way to finish this that said what he wanted to say but wouldn’t, like. Scare her off. “I want us to be in this together. If you’re okay with that.”

Loki looked a little bit like he'd just driven over her in a pickup truck. She stared at him for a long moment, until he started to get seriously worried she was going to tell him ‘no’ and then. “I,” she started, and then hesitated. “Yes?”

Her gaze flicked down to where Peter’s hands were folded on the table in front of him, and, hesitantly, like she wasn’t quite sure this was right, she reached out and put one hand over his. It was really awkward, and she wasn’t quite meeting his eyes, but Peter grinned so wide his cheeks started to hurt. They could do this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaand that's a wrap, folks! until next time! please please please review if you enjoyed this (or if you didn't and read 36k of it anyway, i guess); we're only about a quarter outlined for the sequel, and knowing what you loved and what you hated makes us more effective content creators.
> 
> ETA: my wife told me i should explain that "skywalker" is an actual kenning of loki's thats existed for way longer than star wars, in case you didn't know. so now you know


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